Silk is a natural proteinfiber, some forms of which can be woven into textiles. The protein fiber of silk is composed mainly of fibroin and is produced by certain insect larvae to form cocoons,[1] the best-known silk is obtained from the cocoons of the larvae of the mulberrysilkwormBombyx mori reared in captivity (sericulture). The shimmering appearance of silk is due to the triangular prism-like structure of the silk fibre, which allows silk cloth to refract incoming light at different angles, thus producing different colors.

History

Wild silk

Several kinds of wild silk, which are produced by caterpillars other than the mulberry silkworm, have been known and used in China, South Asia, and Europe since ancient times. However, the scale of production was always far smaller than for cultivated silks. There are several reasons for this: first, they differ from the domesticated varieties in colour and texture and are therefore less uniform; second, cocoons gathered in the wild have usually had the pupa emerge from them before being discovered so the silk thread that makes up the cocoon has been torn into shorter lengths; and third, many wild cocoons are covered in a mineral layer that prevents attempts to reel from them long strands of silk.[5] Thus, the only way to obtain silk suitable for spinning into textiles in areas where commercial silks are not cultivated was by tedious and labor-intensive carding.

Commercial silks originate from reared silkworm pupae, which are bred to produce a white-colored silk thread with no mineral on the surface, the pupae are killed by either dipping them in boiling water before the adult moths emerge or by piercing them with a needle. These factors all contribute to the ability of the whole cocoon to be unravelled as one continuous thread, permitting a much stronger cloth to be woven from the silk. Wild silks also tend to be more difficult to dye than silk from the cultivated silkworm.[6][7] A technique known as demineralizing allows the mineral layer around the cocoon of wild silk moths to be removed,[8] leaving only variability in color as a barrier to creating a commercial silk industry based on wild silks in the parts of the world where wild silk moths thrive, such as in Africa and South America.

Genetic modification of domesticated silkworms is used to facilitate the production of more useful types of silk.[9]

Legend gives credit for developing silk to a Chinese empress, Leizu (Hsi-Ling-Shih, Lei-Tzu). Silks were originally reserved for the Emperors of China for their own use and gifts to others, but spread gradually through Chinese culture and trade both geographically and socially, and then to many regions of Asia, because of its texture and lustre, silk rapidly became a popular luxury fabric in the many areas accessible to Chinese merchants. Silk was in great demand, and became a staple of pre-industrial international trade; in July 2007, archaeologists discovered intricately woven and dyed silk textiles in a tomb in Jiangxi province, dated to the Eastern Zhou Dynasty roughly 2,500 years ago.[15] Although historians have suspected a long history of a formative textile industry in ancient China, this find of silk textiles employing "complicated techniques" of weaving and dyeing provides direct evidence for silks dating before the Mawangdui-discovery and other silks dating to the Han Dynasty (202 BC-220 AD).[15]

Silk is described in a chapter on mulberry planting by Si Shengzhi of the Western Han (206 BC – 9 AD). There is a surviving calendar for silk production in an Eastern Han (25–220 AD) document, the two other known works on silk from the Han period are lost.[10] The first evidence of the long distance silk trade is the finding of silk in the hair of an Egyptianmummy of the 21st dynasty, c.1070 BC.[16] The silk trade reached as far as the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, Europe, and North Africa. This trade was so extensive that the major set of trade routes between Europe and Asia came to be known as the Silk Road.

In the ancient era, silk from China was the most lucrative and sought-after luxury item traded across the Eurasian continent,[20] and many civilizations, such as the ancient Persians, benefited economically from trade.[20]

Chinese silk making process

The silkworms and mulberry leaves are placed on trays.

Twig frames for the silkworms are prepared.

The cocoons are weighed.

The cocoons are soaked and the silk is wound on spools.

The silk is woven using a loom.

India

Silk has a long history in India, it is known as Resham in eastern and north India, and Pattu in southern parts of India. Recent archaeological discoveries in Harappa and Chanhu-daro suggest that sericulture, employing wild silk threads from native silkworm species, existed in South Asia during the time of the Indus Valley Civilization (now in Pakistan) dating between 2450 BC and 2000 BC, while "hard and fast evidence" for silk production in China dates back to around 2570 BC.[21][22] Shelagh Vainker, a silk expert at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, who sees evidence for silk production in China "significantly earlier" than 2500–2000 BC, suggests, "people of the Indus civilization either harvested silkworm cocoons or traded with people who did, and that they knew a considerable amount about silk."[21]

India is also the largest consumer of silk in the world, the tradition of wearing silk sarees for marriages and other auspicious ceremonies is a custom in Assam and southern parts of India. Silk is considered to be a symbol of royalty, and, historically, silk was used primarily by the upper classes. Silk garments and sarees produced in Kanchipuram, Pochampally, Dharmavaram, Mysore, Arani in the south, Banaras in the north, Bhagalpur and Murshidabad in the east are well recognized. In the northeastern state of Assam, three different types of silk are produced, collectively called Assam silk: Muga, Eri and Pat silk. Muga, the golden silk, and Eri are produced by silkworms that are native only to Assam.

Thailand

Silk is produced year-round in Thailand by two types of silkworms, the cultured Bombycidae and wild Saturniidae. Most production is after the rice harvest in the southern and northeastern parts of the country. Women traditionally weave silk on hand looms and pass the skill on to their daughters, as weaving is considered to be a sign of maturity and eligibility for marriage. Thai silk textiles often use complicated patterns in various colours and styles. Most regions of Thailand have their own typical silks. A single thread filament is too thin to use on its own so women combine many threads to produce a thicker, usable fiber, they do this by hand-reeling the threads onto a wooden spindle to produce a uniform strand of raw silk. The process takes around 40 hours to produce a half kilogram of silk. Many local operations use a reeling machine for this task, but some silk threads are still hand-reeled, the difference is that hand-reeled threads produce three grades of silk: two fine grades that are ideal for lightweight fabrics, and a thick grade for heavier material.

The silk fabric is soaked in extremely cold water and bleached before dyeing to remove the natural yellow coloring of Thai silk yarn. To do this, skeins of silk thread are immersed in large tubs of hydrogen peroxide. Once washed and dried, the silk is woven on a traditional hand-operated loom.[26]

Bangladesh

The Rajshahi Division of northern Bangladesh is the hub of the country's silk industry. There are three types of silk produced in the region: mulberry, endi and tassar. Bengali silk was a major item of international trade for centuries. It was known as Ganges silk in medieval Europe. Bengal was the leading exporter of silk between the 16th and 19th centuries.[27]

Ancient Mediterranean

In the Odyssey, 19.233, when Odysseus, while pretending to be someone else, is questioned by Penelope about her husband's clothing, he says that he wore a shirt "gleaming like the skin of a dried onion" (varies with translations, literal translation here)[28] which could refer to the lustrous quality of silk fabric. Aristotle wrote of Coa vestis, a wild silk textile from Kos. Sea silk from certain large sea shells was also valued. The Roman Empire knew of and traded in silk, and Chinese silk was the most highly priced luxury good imported by them,[20] during the reign of emperor Tiberius, sumptuary laws were passed that forbade men from wearing silk garments, but these proved ineffectual.[29] The Historia Augusta mentions that the 3rd Century AD emperor Elagabalus was the first Roman to wear garments of pure silk, whereas it had been customary to wear fabrics of silk/cotton or silk/linen blends,[30] despite the popularity of silk, the secret of silk-making only reached Europe around AD 550, via the Byzantine Empire. Legend has it that monks working for the emperor Justinian Ismuggled silkworm eggs to Constantinople in hollow canes from China. All top-quality looms and weavers were located inside the Great Palace complex in Constantinople, and the cloth produced was used in imperial robes or in diplomacy, as gifts to foreign dignitaries, the remainder was sold at very high prices.

Middle East

In the Torah, a scarlet cloth item called in Hebrew "sheni tola'at" שני תולעת – literally "crimson of the worm" – is described as being used in purification ceremonies, such as those following a leprosy outbreak (Leviticus 14), alongside cedar wood and hyssop (za'atar). Eminent scholar and leading medieval translator of Jewish sources and books of the Bible into Arabic, Rabbi Saadia Gaon, translates this phrase explicitly as "crimson silk" – חריר קרמז حرير قرمز.

In Islamic teachings, Muslim men are forbidden to wear silk. Many religious jurists believe the reasoning behind the prohibition lies in avoiding clothing for men that can be considered feminine or extravagant.[31] There are disputes regarding the amount of silk a fabric can consist of (e.g., whether a small decorative silk piece on a cotton caftan is permissible or not) for it to be lawful for men to wear, but the dominant opinion of most Muslim scholars is that the wearing of silk by men is forbidden. Modern attire has raised a number of issues, including, for instance, the permissibility of wearing silk neckties, which are masculine articles of clothing.

Despite injunctions against silk for men, silk has retained its popularity in the Islamic world because of its permissibility for women, and due to the presence of non-Muslim communities, the Muslim Moors brought silk with them to Spain during their conquest of the Iberian Peninsula.

Medieval and modern Europe

Silk satin leaf, wood sticks and guards, c. 1890

Italy was the most important producer of silk during the Medieval age, the first center to introduce silk production to Italy was the city of Catanzaro during the 11th century in the region of Calabria. The silk of Catanzaro supplied almost all of Europe and was sold in a large market fair in the port of Reggio Calabria, to Spanish, Venetian, Genovese and Dutch merchants. Catanzaro became the lace capital of the world with a large silkworm breeding facility that produced all the laces and linens used in the Vatican, the city was world-famous for its fine fabrication of silks, velvets, damasks and brocades.[32]

Another notable center was the Italian city-state of Lucca which largely financed itself through silk-production and silk-trading, beginning in the 12th century. Other Italian cities involved in silk production were Genoa, Venice and Florence.

The Silk Exchange in Valencia from the 15th century—where previously in 1348 also perxal (percale) was traded as some kind of silk—illustrates the power and wealth of one of the great Mediterranean mercantile cities.[33][34]

Silk was produced in and exported from the province of Granada, Spain, especially the Alpujarras region, until the Moriscos, whose industry it was, were expelled from Granada in 1571.[35][36]

Since the 15th century, silk production in France has been centered around the city of Lyon where many mechanic tools for mass production were first introduced in the 17th century.

James I attempted to establish silk production in England, purchasing and planting 100,000 mulberry trees, some on land adjacent to Hampton Court Palace, but they were of a species unsuited to the silk worms, and the attempt failed. In 1732 John Guardivaglio set up a silk throwing enterprise at Logwood mill in Stockport; in 1744, Burton Mill was erected in Macclesfield; and in 1753 Old Mill was built in Congleton.[37] These three towns remained the centre of the English silk throwing industry until silk throwing was replaced by silk waste spinning. British enterprise also established silk filature in Cyprus in 1928; in England in the mid-20th century, raw silk was produced at Lullingstone Castle in Kent. Silkworms were raised and reeled under the direction of Zoe Lady Hart Dyke, later moving to Ayot St Lawrence in Hertfordshire in 1956.[38]

North America

King James I introduced silk-growing to the American colonies around 1619, ostensibly to discourage tobacco planting, the Shakers in Kentucky adopted the practice. In the 19th century a new attempt at a silk industry began with European-born workers in Paterson, New Jersey, and the city became a silk center in the United States. Manchester, Connecticut emerged as center of the silk industry in America from the late 19th through the mid-20th century. The Cheney Brothers Historic District showcases mills refurbished as apartments and includes nearby museums.

World War II interrupted the silk trade from Asia, and silk prices increased dramatically.[42] U.S. industry began to look for substitutes, which led to the use of synthetics such as nylon. Synthetic silks have also been made from lyocell, a type of cellulose fiber, and are often difficult to distinguish from real silk (see spider silk for more on synthetic silks).

Malaysia

In Terengganu, which is now part of Malaysia, a second generation of silkworm was being imported as early as 1764 for the country's silk textile industry, especially songket.[43] However, since the 1980s, Malaysia is no longer engaged in sericulture but does plant mulberry trees.

Vietnam

In Vietnamese legend, silk appeared in the sixth dynasty of Hùng Vương.

Production process

The process of silk production is known as sericulture,[44] the entire production process of silk can be divided into several steps which are typically handled by different entities[clarification needed]. Extracting raw silk starts by cultivating the silkworms on mulberry leaves. Once the worms start pupating in their cocoons, these are dissolved in boiling water in order for individual long fibres to be extracted and fed into the spinning reel.[45]

To produce 1 kg of silk, 104 kg of mulberry leaves must be eaten by 3000 silkworms. It takes about 5000 silkworms to make a pure silk kimono,[46]:104 the major silk producers are China (54%) and India (14%).[47] Other statistics:[48]

The environmental impact of silk production is potentially large when compared with other natural fibers. A life cycle assessment of Indian silk production shows that the production process has a large carbon and water footprint, mainly due to the fact that it is an animal-derived fiber and more inputs such as fertilizer and water are needed per unit of fiber produced.[49]

Properties

Models in silk dresses at the MoMo Falana fashion show

Physical properties

Silk fibers from the Bombyx mori silkworm have a triangularcross section with rounded corners, 5–10 μm wide. The fibroin-heavy chain is composed mostly of beta-sheets, due to a 59-mer amino acid repeat sequence with some variations,[50] the flat surfaces of the fibrils reflect light at many angles, giving silk a natural sheen. The cross-section from other silkworms can vary in shape and diameter: crescent-like for Anaphe and elongated wedge for tussah. Silkworm fibers are naturally extruded from two silkworm glands as a pair of primary filaments (brin), which are stuck together, with sericin proteins that act like glue, to form a bave. Bave diameters for tussah silk can reach 65 μm. See cited reference for cross-sectional SEM photographs.[51]

Raw silk of domesticated silk worms, showing its natural shine.

Silk has a smooth, soft texture that is not slippery, unlike many synthetic fibers.

Silk is one of the strongest natural fibers, but it loses up to 20% of its strength when wet, it has a good moisture regain of 11%. Its elasticity is moderate to poor: if elongated even a small amount, it remains stretched, it can be weakened if exposed to too much sunlight. It may also be attacked by insects, especially if left dirty.

One example of the durable nature of silk over other fabrics is demonstrated by the recovery in 1840 of silk garments from a wreck of 1782: 'The most durable article found has been silk; for besides pieces of cloaks and lace, a pair of black satin breeches, and a large satin waistcoat with flaps, were got up, of which the silk was perfect, but the lining entirely gone ... from the thread giving way ... No articles of dress of woollen cloth have yet been found.'[52]

Silk is a poor conductor of electricity and thus susceptible to static cling. Silk has a high emissivity for infrared light, making it feel cool to the touch.[53]

Unwashed silk chiffon may shrink up to 8% due to a relaxation of the fiber macrostructure, so silk should either be washed prior to garment construction, or dry cleaned. Dry cleaning may still shrink the chiffon up to 4%. Occasionally, this shrinkage can be reversed by a gentle steaming with a press cloth. There is almost no gradual shrinkage nor shrinkage due to molecular-level deformation.

Natural and synthetic silk is known to manifest piezoelectric properties in proteins, probably due to its molecular structure.[54]

Silkworm silk was used as the standard for the denier, a measurement of linear density in fibers. Silkworm silk therefore has a linear density of approximately 1 den, or 1.1 dtex.

Chemical properties

Silk emitted by the silkworm consists of two main proteins, sericin and fibroin, fibroin being the structural center of the silk, and serecin being the sticky material surrounding it. Fibroin is made up of the amino acidsGly-Ser-Gly-Ala-Gly-Ala and forms beta pleated sheets. Hydrogen bonds form between chains, and side chains form above and below the plane of the hydrogen bond network.

The high proportion (50%) of glycine allows tight packing, this is because glycine's R group is only a hydrogen and so is not as sterically constrained. The addition of alanine and serine makes the fibres strong and resistant to breaking, this tensile strength is due to the many interceded hydrogen bonds, and when stretched the force is applied to these numerous bonds and they do not break.

Silk is resistant to most mineral acids, except for sulfuric acid, which dissolves it, it is yellowed by perspiration. Chlorine bleach will also destroy silk fabrics.

Variants

Regenerated silk fiber

RSF is produced by chemically dissolving silkworm cocoons, leaving their molecular structure intact, the silk fibers dissolve into tiny thread-like structures known as microfibrils. The resulting solution is extruded through a small opening, causing the microfibrils to reassemble into a single fiber, the resulting material is reportedly twice as stiff as silk.[56]

Furniture

Silk's attractive lustre and drape makes it suitable for many furnishing applications, it is used for upholstery, wall coverings, window treatments (if blended with another fiber), rugs, bedding and wall hangings.[citation needed]

Industry

Medicine

A special manufacturing process removes the outer sericin coating of the silk, which makes it suitable as non-absorbable surgical sutures, this process has also recently led to the introduction of specialist silk underclothing, which has been used for skin conditions including eczema.[58][59] New uses and manufacturing techniques have been found for silk for making everything from disposable cups to drug delivery systems and holograms.[60]

Biomaterial

Silk has been considered as a luxurious textile since 3630 BC. However, it started to serve also as a biomedical material for suture in surgeries decades ago; in the past 30 years, it has been widely studied and used as a biomaterial, which refers to materials used for medical applications in organisms, due to its excellent properties, including remarkable mechanical properties, comparative biocompatibility, tunable degradation rates in vitro and in vivo, the ease to load cellular growth factors (for example, BMP-2), and the ability to be processed into several other formats such as films, gels, particles, and scaffolds.[61] Silks from Bombyx mori, a kind of cultivated silkworm, are the most widely investigated silks.[62]

Silks derived from Bombyx mori are generally made of two parts: the silk fibroin fiber which contains a light chain of 25kDa and a heavy chain of 350kDa (or 390kDa[63]) linked by a single disulfide bond[64] and a glue-like protein, sericin, comprising 25 to 30 percentage by weight. Silk fibroin contains hydrophobic Beta sheet blocks, interrupted by small hydrophilic groups. And the beta-sheets contribute much to the high mechanical strength of silk fibers, which achieves 740 MPa, tens of times that of poly(lactic acid) and hundreds of times that of collagen, this impressive mechanical strength has made silk fibroin very competitive for applications in biomaterials. Indeed, silk fibers have found their way into tendon tissue engineering,[65] where mechanical properties matter greatly; in addition, mechanical properties of silks from various kinds of silkworms vary widely, which provides more choices for their use in tissue engineering.

Most products fabricated from regenerated silk are weak and brittle, with only ~1–2% of the mechanical strength of native silk fibers due to the absence of appropriate secondary and hierarchical structure,

Biocompatibility

Biocompatibility, i.e., the ability to what level the silk will cause an immune response, is definitely a critical issue for biomaterials. The biocompatibility of silk arose during its increasing clinical use. Indeed, wax or silicone is usually used as a coating to avoid fraying and potential immune responses[61] when silk fibers serve as suture materials, although the lack of detailed characterization of silk fibers, such as the extent of the removal of sericin, the surface chemical properties of coating material, and the process used, make it difficult to determine the real immune response of silk fibers in literature, it is generally believed that sericin is the major cause of immune response. Thus, the removal of sericin is an essential step to assure biocompatibility in biomaterial applications of silk. However, further research fails to prove clearly the contribution of sericin to inflammatory responses based on isolated sericin and sericin based biomaterials;[67] in addition, silk fibroin exhibits an inflammatory response similar to that of tissue culture plastic in vitro[68][69] when assessed with human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs) or lower than collagen and PLA when implant rat MSCs with silk fibroin films in vivo.[69] Thus, appropriate degumming and sterilization will assure the biocompatibility of silk fibroin, which is further validated by in vivo experiments on rats and pigs.[70] There are still concerns about the long-term safety of silk-based biomaterials in the human body in contrast to these promising results. Even though silk sutures serve well, they exist and interact within a limited period depending on the recovery of wounds (several weeks), much shorter than that in tissue engineering. Another concern arises from biodegradation because the biocompatibility of silk fibroin does not necessarily assure the biocompatibility of the decomposed products; in fact, different levels of immune responses[71][72] and diseases[73] have been triggered by the degraded products of silk fibroin.

Biodegradability

Biodegradability (also known as biodegradation)--the ability to be disintegrated by biological approaches, including bacteria, fungi, and cells—is another significant property of biomaterials today. Biodegradable materials can minimize the pain of patients from surgeries, especially in tissue engineering, there is no need of surgery in order to remove the scaffold implanted. Wang et al.[74] showed the in vivo degradation of silk via aqueous 3-D scaffolds implanted into Lewis rats. Enzymes are the means used to achieve degradation of silk in vitro. Protease XIV from Streptomyces griseus and α-chymotrypsin from bovine pancreases are the two popular enzymes for silk degradation; in addition, gamma-radiation, as well as cell metabolism, can also regulate the degradation of silk.

Compared with synthetic biomaterials such as polyglycolides and polylactides, silk is obviously advantageous in some aspects in biodegradation, the acidic degraded products of polyglycolides and polylactides will decrease the pH of the ambient environment and thus adversely influence the metabolism of cells, which is not an issue for silk. In addition, silk materials can retain strength over a desired period from weeks to months as needed by mediating the content of beta sheets.

Cultivation

Silk moths lay eggs on specially prepared paper, the eggs hatch and the caterpillars (silkworms) are fed fresh mulberry leaves. After about 35 days and 4 moltings, the caterpillars are 10,000 times heavier than when hatched and are ready to begin spinning a cocoon. A straw frame is placed over the tray of caterpillars, and each caterpillar begins spinning a cocoon by moving its head in a pattern. Two glands produce liquid silk and force it through openings in the head called spinnerets. Liquid silk is coated in sericin, a water-soluble protective gum, and solidifies on contact with the air. Within 2–3 days, the caterpillar spins about 1 mile of filament and is completely encased in a cocoon, the silk farmers then heat the cocoons to kill them, leaving some to metamorphose into moths to breed the next generation of caterpillars. Harvested cocoons are then soaked in boiling water to soften the sericin holding the silk fibers together in a cocoon shape, the fibers are then unwound to produce a continuous thread. Since a single thread is too fine and fragile for commercial use, anywhere from three to ten strands are spun together to form a single thread of silk.[75]

Animal rights

As the process of harvesting the silk from the cocoon kills the larvae by boiling them, sericulture has been criticized by animal welfare and rights activists.[76]Mohandas Gandhi was critical of silk production based on the Ahimsa philosophy which led to promotion of cotton and Ahimsa silk, a type of wild silk made from the cocoons of wild and semi-wild silk moths.[77]

^Hill, John E. (2009) Through the Jade Gate to Rome: A Study of the Silk Routes during the Later Han Dynasty, 1st to 2nd Centuries CE. BookSurge, Charleston, South Carolina. ISBN978-1-4392-2134-1. Appendix A: "Introduction of Silk Cultivation to Khotan in the 1st Century CE," pp. 466–467.

1.
Pure Silk-Bahamas LPGA Classic
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The Pure Silk-Bahamas LPGA Classic is a womens professional golf tournament in The Bahamas on the LPGA Tour. It debuted in May 2013 at Ocean Club Golf Course on Paradise Island, ilhee Lee won the inaugural event, two strokes ahead of Irene Cho. * The 2013 tournament was reduced to 36 holes played in three 12-hole rounds due to course flooding, the original tournament dates in 2013 were May 23–26. Official website Coverage on LPGA Tours official site Ocean Club Golf Course

2.
Bombyx mori
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The silkworm is the larva or caterpillar of the domesticated silk moth, Bombyx mori. It is an important insect, being a primary producer of silk. A silkworms preferred food is white mulberry leaves, though they may eat other mulberry species, domestic silk moths are closely dependent on humans for reproduction, as a result of millennia of selective breeding. Wild silk moths are different from their cousins, they are not as commercially viable in the production of silk. The silkworm was domesticated from the wild silkmoth Bombyx mandarina, which has a range from northern India to northern China, Korea, Japan, the domesticated silkworm derives from Chinese rather than Japanese or Korean stock. Silkworms were unlikely to have been domestically bred before the Neolithic age, before then, the tools to manufacture quantities of silk thread had not been developed. The domesticated B. mori and the wild B. mandarina can still breed, mulberry silkworms can be categorized into three different but connected groups or types. The major groups of silkworms fall under the univoltine and bivoltine categories, the univoltine breed is generally linked with the geographical area within greater Europe. The eggs of this type hibernate during winter due to the cold climate, the second type is called bivoltine and is normally found in China, Japan, and Korea. The breeding process of this takes place twice annually, a feat made possible through the slightly warmer climates. The polyvoltine type of mulberry silkworm can only be found in the tropics, the eggs are laid by female moths and hatch within nine to 12 days, so the resulting type can have up to eight separate life cycles throughout the year. Eggs take about 14 days to hatch into larvae, which eat continuously and they have a preference for white mulberry, having an attraction to the mulberry odorant cis-jasmone. They are not monophagous since they can eat other species of Morus, as well as some other Moraceae and they are covered with tiny black hairs. When the color of their heads turns darker, it indicates they are about to molt, after molting, the instar phase of the silkworms emerge white, naked, and with little horns on their backs. After they have molted four times, their bodies become slightly yellow, the larvae then prepare to enter the pupal phase of their lifecycle, and enclose themselves in a cocoon made up of raw silk produced by the salivary glands. The final molt from larva to pupa takes place within the cocoon, to prevent this, silkworm cocoons are boiled. The heat kills the silkworms and the water makes the cocoons easier to unravel, often, the silkworm itself is eaten. As the process of harvesting the silk from the cocoon kills the larvae, sericulture has been criticized by animal welfare, mahatma Gandhi was critical of silk production based on the Ahimsa philosophy not to hurt any living thing

3.
Hyalophora cecropia
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Hyalophora cecropia is North Americas largest native moth. It is a member of the Saturniidae family, or giant silk moths, females with a wingspan of six inches or more have been documented. It is found as far west as the Rocky Mountains and north into the majority of Canadian provinces, the larvae of these moths are most commonly found on maple trees, but they have been known to feed on cherry and birch trees among many others. Like all members of the giant silk moth family, the nocturnal adult cecropia moths only reproduce, therefore, they survive a maximum of about two weeks. To find a mate, the female cecropia moth emits pheromones which the males sensitive antennae can detect up to a mile away, mating begins in the early morning hours and lasts until the evening. Afterward the female lays up to one hundred eggs, which hatch into tiny black caterpillars and these larvae feed upon many common trees and shrubs, including maple, birch, and apple. As they grow larger, it clear that the black color is actually small black hairs growing from tubercles all over the body. As the larvae grow, the coloration becomes green to bluish-green, with the tubercles becoming blue, yellow or orange, depending on body location, hyalophora cecropia moths are univoltine, having only one generation per year. Differentiating between sexes of this species is very easy, the most obvious difference is in the plumose or feathery antennae. Males possess large feathery antennae while females have smaller, less bushy antenna, females also have larger, more rounded abdomens than males. Pests of the moths have become a significant problem, parasitoids, such as some species of wasps and flies, lay their eggs in or on the young caterpillars. The eggs then hatch into larvae, which consume the internal organs, the parasitoid releases chemicals that override the regulatory mechanisms of the caterpillar. Once the parasitoid has grown enough, it induces the caterpillar to pupate, once the caterpillars pupate, the parasitoid larvae themselves pupate, killing the cecropia pupa. Squirrels also consume the pupae of moths, which can decrease the populations significantly. Pruning of trees and leaving outdoor lights on at night can also be detrimental to cecropia moths, the original description of the insect juvenile hormone by Carrol M. Williams in Nature in 1956 is from the Cecropia silkworm the giant silkworm. This large insect had enough juvenile hormone in its abdomen to permit extraction of detectable JH from a single abdomen, in August 2012, a cecropia moth caterpillar was accidentally imported from Ontario to St. John’s, Newfoundland, via a shipment of dogwood shrubs. Cecropia are not native to the latter province, on 29 May 2013, the predominantly black and red female moth — named ‘Georgina’ by the facility’s staff — emerged from her cocoon boasting a roughly 20 cm wingspan. After allowing Georgina to complete her natural lifespan, researchers planned to pin, picture journal of cecropia development The cecropia moth Video presentation of mating Cecropia moths

4.
Antheraea pernyi
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Antheraea pernyi, the Chinese tussar moth, also known as temperate tussar moth, is a large moth in the family Saturniidae. Antheraea roylei is a close relative, and the present species might actually have evolved from ancestral A. roylei by chromosome rearrangement. They are originally from southern China, used for Tussar silk production, they have been distributed more widely across subtropical and tropical Asia. The colour and quality of the silk depends on the climate and this is one of the major producers of Tussar silk. It was of importance during the Han Dynasty and early Three Kingdoms era. More recently, the hybridogenic species Antheraea × proylei is being bred for tussah silk production and it originated from a natural hybrid between male A. pernyi and A. roylei females, F1 females of which were backcrossed to A. pernyi males. The immune responses of A. pernyi to bacterial infection have been analyzed based on injection by Escherichia coli D31, cecropin B and D, hemolin, attacin and lysozyme were detected in the hemolymph. Also, injection of E. coli led to the discovery of a 380-kDa lectin with affinity to galactose, a. pernyi has been used in research on virus defense in insects. It was discovered that hemolin was induced after injection of baculovirus, the Japanese and Chinese Oak-Silk Spinner, Their Life and Cultivation. The Journal of the Manchester Geographical Society, nos. 4–6 April to June, pp. 183–193. Supplementary figure 1 Supplementary figure 2 Supplementary figure 3 Life Cycle Warning, Many images, may require a lot of bandwidth http, //www. cdfd. org. in/wildsilkbase/info_moths. php

5.
Samia cynthia
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Samia cynthia is a saturniid moth, used to produce silk fabric but not as domesticated as the silkworm, Bombyx mori. The moth has very large wings of 113–125 mm, with a quarter-moon shaped spot on both the upper and lower wings, whitish and yellow stripes and brown background, there are eyespots on the outer fore wings. The common name Ailanthus silkmoth refers to the host plant Ailanthus, the eri silk worm is the only completely domesticated silkworm other than Bombyx mori. The silk is extremely durable, but cannot be easily reeled off the cocoon and is spun like cotton or wool. Larvae are gregarious and yellow at first, later instars are solitary, and whitish-green with white tubercules along the back, and small black dots. Five instars, maximum length 70–75 mm, a silken off-white to grey cocoon is spun on the leaves of the host. It has an escape hatch. Females prepare to mate in the evening or night after emerging in late morning, adult flight is during May and June in northern Europe, as one generation. In southern Europe a partial second generation may occur in September, adults lack mouth parts and can neither eat nor drink. Larvae will feed on trees and shrubs, but all eggs are laid on the tree of heaven. This tree is grown as an ornamental in cities. The subspecies S. cynthia ricini feeds upon castor bean, sericulture Tuskes, PM, JP Tuttle and MM Collins. The wild silk moths of North America

6.
Meyers Konversations-Lexikon
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The first part of Das Grosse Conversations-Lexikon für die gebildeten Stände appeared in October 1839. In contrast to its contemporaries, it contained maps and illustrations with the text, there is no indication of the planned number of volumes or a time limit for this project, but little headway had been made by the otherwise dynamic Meyer. After six years,14 volumes had appeared, covering only one fifth of the alphabet, another six years passed before the last volume was published. Six supplementary volumes finally finished the work in 1855, ultimately numbering 52 volumes, Das Grosse Conversations-Lexikon für die gebildeten Stände was the most comprehensive completed German encyclopedia of the 19th century, also called der Wunder-Meyer. The complete set was reprinted 1858-59, the son of Joseph Meyer, Hermann Julius, published the next edition, entitled Neues Conversations-Lexikon für alle Stände, 1857–60, that would only count 15 volumes. To avoid a long-time project, subscribers were promised it would be completed three years, and all volumes appearing later would be given free. Of course, it was finished right on time, the 2nd edition, Neues Konversations-Lexikon, ein Wörterbuch des allgemeinen Wissens, appeared 1861-67, the 3rd edition, now from Leipzig, was issued as Meyers Konversations-Lexikon. Eine Encyklopädie des allgemeinen Wissens 1874-78, both had 15 volumes, the 4th edition, consisting of 16 volumes, appeared in 1885-90, with 2 supplements of update pages, vol.17 and vol. The 5th edition had 17 volumes, Meyers Konversations-Lexikon, ein Nachschlagewerk des allgemeinen Wissens,1893 to 1897. This edition sold no less than 233,000 sets, the 6th edition, entitled Meyers Großes Konversations-Lexikon, was published 1902-08. It had 20 volumes, and the largest sale of all Meyer editions, the First World War prevented an even bigger success. There was also the small 1908 edition, Meyers Kleines Konversations-Lexikon, the 7th and 8th editions were both briefly named Meyers Lexikon. The 7th edition counted only 12 volumes, due to the depression of the twenties. It came with a condensed single-volume version known as the Blitz-Lexikon, the 8th edition remained incomplete due to wartime circumstances, out of 12 planned volumes only volumes number 1 through 9 plus the atlas volume number 12 could be issued. The buildings of the company were destroyed by the bombing raids on Leipzig in 1943/44. In 1953 the place of business was moved to Mannheim in West Germany, the 9th edition, now from Mannheim, entitled Meyers Enzyklopädisches Lexikon in 25 Bänden, appeared in 1971-79. Just like the very first, this final Mannheim edition was the most comprehensive German encyclopaedia of the century, from Leipzig came Meyers Neues Lexikon, embedded in the Marxist ideology. In 1984, the Bibliographisches Institut Mannheim amalgamated with its biggest competitor in field of reference books F. A. Brockhaus of Wiesbaden, in a so-called Elefantenhochzeit

7.
Seal script
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Seal script is an ancient style of writing Chinese characters that was common throughout the latter half of the 1st millennium BC. It evolved organically out of the Zhou dynasty script, arising in the Warring State of Qin, there are two uses of the word seal script, the Large or Great Seal script and the lesser or Small Seal Script, the latter is also called simply seal script. The Large Seal script was originally a later, vague Han dynasty reference to writing of the Qin system similar to and it has also been used to refer to Western Zhou forms or even oracle bones as well. There were several different variants of seal script which developed in each kingdom independently during the warring state period and spring, the birds and worms script was used in the Kingdoms of Wu, Chu, and Yue. It was found on several artifacts including the Spear of Fuchai, on one side of the blade of Goujian, eight characters were written in an ancient script. The script was found to be the one called 鳥蟲文 birds and worms characters, initial analysis of the text deciphered six of the characters, 越王 and 自作用劍. As a southern state, Chu was close to the Wu-Yue influences, Chu produced broad bronze swords that were similar to Wuyue swords, but not as intricate. Chu also used the Birds and Worms style, which was borrowed by the Wu, the script of the Qin system had evolved organically from the Zhou script starting in the Spring and Autumn period. Beginning around the Warring States period, it became vertically elongated with a regular appearance and this was the period of maturation of Small Seal script, also called simply seal script. Through Chinese commentaries, it is known that Li Si compiled Cangjiepian and their form is characterized by being less rectangular and more squarish. The first known character dictionary was the 3rd century BC Erya, collated and bibliographed by Liu Xiang and his son Liu Xin, not long after, however, the Shuowen Jiezi, the lifework of Xu Shen, was written. Its 9,353 entries reproduce the standardized small-seal script variant for each entry, entries are categorized under 540 section headers. It has been anticipated that the Small Seal script will some day be encoded in Unicode, codepoints U+34000 to U+368FF have been tentatively allocated. Old Texts Phags-pa Chén Zhāoróng Research on the Qín Lineage of Writing, academia Sinica, Institute of History and Philology Monograph. Qin Yun Song, Big Seal Script Banner Script translation Richard Sears on seal script

8.
Traditional Chinese characters
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Traditional Chinese characters are Chinese characters in any character set that does not contain newly created characters or character substitutions performed after 1946. They are most commonly the characters in the character sets of Taiwan, of Hong Kong. Currently, a number of overseas Chinese online newspapers allow users to switch between both sets. In contrast, simplified Chinese characters are used in mainland China, Singapore, the debate on traditional and simplified Chinese characters has been a long-running issue among Chinese communities. Although simplified characters are taught and endorsed by the government of Mainland China, Traditional characters are used informally in regions in China primarily in handwriting and also used for inscriptions and religious text. They are often retained in logos or graphics to evoke yesteryear, nonetheless, the vast majority of media and communications in China is dominated by simplified characters. Taiwan has never adopted Simplified Chinese characters since it is ruled by the Republic of China, the use of simplified characters in official documents is even prohibited by the government in Taiwan. Simplified characters are not well understood in general, although some stroke simplifications that have incorporated into Simplified Chinese are in common use in handwriting. For example, while the name of Taiwan is written as 臺灣, similarly, in Hong Kong and Macau, Traditional Chinese has been the legal written form since colonial times. In recent years, because of the influx of mainland Chinese tourists, today, even government websites use simplified Chinese, as they answer to the Beijing government. This has led to concerns by residents to protect their local heritage. In Southeast Asia, the Chinese Filipino community continues to be one of the most conservative regarding simplification, while major public universities are teaching simplified characters, many well-established Chinese schools still use traditional characters. Publications like the Chinese Commercial News, World News, and United Daily News still use traditional characters, on the other hand, the Philippine Chinese Daily uses simplified. Aside from local newspapers, magazines from Hong Kong, such as the Yazhou Zhoukan, are found in some bookstores. In case of film or television subtitles on DVD, the Chinese dub that is used in Philippines is the same as the one used in Taiwan and this is because the DVDs belongs to DVD Region Code 3. Hence, most of the subtitles are in Traditional Characters, overseas Chinese in the United States have long used traditional characters. A major influx of Chinese immigrants to the United States occurred during the half of the 19th century. Therefore, the majority of Chinese language signage in the United States, including street signs, Traditional Chinese characters are called several different names within the Chinese-speaking world

9.
Simplified Chinese characters
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Simplified Chinese characters are standardized Chinese characters prescribed in the Table of General Standard Chinese Characters for use in mainland China. Along with traditional Chinese characters, it is one of the two character sets of the contemporary Chinese written language. The government of the Peoples Republic of China in mainland China has promoted them for use in printing since the 1950s and 1960s in an attempt to increase literacy and they are officially used in the Peoples Republic of China and Singapore. Traditional Chinese characters are used in Hong Kong, Macau. Overseas Chinese communities generally tend to use traditional characters, Simplified Chinese characters may be referred to by their official name above or colloquially. Strictly, the latter refers to simplifications of character structure or body, character forms that have existed for thousands of years alongside regular, Simplified character forms were created by decreasing the number of strokes and simplifying the forms of a sizable proportion of traditional Chinese characters. Some simplifications were based on popular cursive forms embodying graphic or phonetic simplifications of the traditional forms, some characters were simplified by applying regular rules, for example, by replacing all occurrences of a certain component with a simplified version of the component. Variant characters with the pronunciation and identical meaning were reduced to a single standardized character. Finally, many characters were left untouched by simplification, and are identical between the traditional and simplified Chinese orthographies. Some simplified characters are very dissimilar to and unpredictably different from traditional characters and this often leads opponents not well-versed in the method of simplification to conclude that the overall process of character simplification is also arbitrary. In reality, the methods and rules of simplification are few, on the other hand, proponents of simplification often flaunt a few choice simplified characters as ingenious inventions, when in fact these have existed for hundreds of years as ancient variants. However, the Chinese government never officially dropped its goal of further simplification in the future, in August 2009, the PRC began collecting public comments for a modified list of simplified characters. The new Table of General Standard Chinese Characters consisting of 8,105 characters was promulgated by the State Council of the Peoples Republic of China on June 5,2013, cursive written text almost always includes character simplification. Simplified forms used in print have always existed, they date back to as early as the Qin dynasty, One of the earliest proponents of character simplification was Lubi Kui, who proposed in 1909 that simplified characters should be used in education. In the years following the May Fourth Movement in 1919, many anti-imperialist Chinese intellectuals sought ways to modernise China, Traditional culture and values such as Confucianism were challenged. Soon, people in the Movement started to cite the traditional Chinese writing system as an obstacle in modernising China and it was suggested that the Chinese writing system should be either simplified or completely abolished. Fu Sinian, a leader of the May Fourth Movement, called Chinese characters the writing of ox-demons, lu Xun, a renowned Chinese author in the 20th century, stated that, If Chinese characters are not destroyed, then China will die. Recent commentators have claimed that Chinese characters were blamed for the problems in China during that time

10.
Standard Chinese
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Its pronunciation is based on the Beijing dialect, its vocabulary on the Mandarin dialects, and its grammar is based on written vernacular Chinese. Like other varieties of Chinese, Standard Chinese is a language with topic-prominent organization. It has more initial consonants but fewer vowels, final consonants, Standard Chinese is an analytic language, though with many compound words. There exist two standardised forms of the language, namely Putonghua in Mainland China and Guoyu in Taiwan, aside from a number of differences in pronunciation and vocabulary, Putonghua is written using simplified Chinese characters, while Guoyu is written using traditional Chinese characters. There are many characters that are identical between the two systems, in English, the governments of China and Hong Kong use Putonghua, Putonghua Chinese, Mandarin Chinese, and Mandarin, while those of Taiwan, Singapore, and Malaysia, use Mandarin. The name Putonghua also has a long, albeit unofficial, history and it was used as early as 1906 in writings by Zhu Wenxiong to differentiate a modern, standard Chinese from classical Chinese and other varieties of Chinese. For some linguists of the early 20th century, the Putonghua, or common tongue/speech, was different from the Guoyu. The former was a prestige variety, while the latter was the legal standard. Based on common understandings of the time, the two were, in fact, different, Guoyu was understood as formal vernacular Chinese, which is close to classical Chinese. By contrast, Putonghua was called the speech of the modern man. The use of the term Putonghua by left-leaning intellectuals such as Qu Qiubai, prior to this, the government used both terms interchangeably. In Taiwan, Guoyu continues to be the term for Standard Chinese. The term Putonghua, on the contrary, implies nothing more than the notion of a lingua franca, Huayu, or language of the Chinese nation, originally simply meant Chinese language, and was used in overseas communities to contrast Chinese with foreign languages. Over time, the desire to standardise the variety of Chinese spoken in these communities led to the adoption of the name Huayu to refer to Mandarin and it also incorporates the notion that Mandarin is usually not the national or common language of the areas in which overseas Chinese live. The term Mandarin is a translation of Guānhuà, which referred to the lingua franca of the late Chinese empire, in English, Mandarin may refer to the standard language, the dialect group as a whole, or to historic forms such as the late Imperial lingua franca. The name Modern Standard Mandarin is sometimes used by linguists who wish to distinguish the current state of the language from other northern. Chinese has long had considerable variation, hence prestige dialects have always existed. Confucius, for example, used yǎyán rather than colloquial regional dialects, rime books, which were written since the Northern and Southern dynasties, may also have reflected one or more systems of standard pronunciation during those times

11.
Pinyin
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Pinyin, or Hànyǔ Pīnyīn, is the official romanization system for Standard Chinese in mainland China, Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan. It is often used to teach Standard Chinese, which is written using Chinese characters. The system includes four diacritics denoting tones, Pinyin without tone marks is used to spell Chinese names and words in languages written with the Latin alphabet, and also in certain computer input methods to enter Chinese characters. The pinyin system was developed in the 1950s by many linguists, including Zhou Youguang and it was published by the Chinese government in 1958 and revised several times. The International Organization for Standardization adopted pinyin as a standard in 1982. The system was adopted as the standard in Taiwan in 2009. The word Hànyǔ means the language of the Han people. In 1605, the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci published Xizi Qiji in Beijing and this was the first book to use the Roman alphabet to write the Chinese language. Twenty years later, another Jesuit in China, Nicolas Trigault, neither book had much immediate impact on the way in which Chinese thought about their writing system, and the romanizations they described were intended more for Westerners than for the Chinese. One of the earliest Chinese thinkers to relate Western alphabets to Chinese was late Ming to early Qing Dynasty scholar-official, the first late Qing reformer to propose that China adopt a system of spelling was Song Shu. A student of the great scholars Yu Yue and Zhang Taiyan, Song had been to Japan and observed the effect of the kana syllabaries. This galvanized him into activity on a number of fronts, one of the most important being reform of the script, while Song did not himself actually create a system for spelling Sinitic languages, his discussion proved fertile and led to a proliferation of schemes for phonetic scripts. The Wade–Giles system was produced by Thomas Wade in 1859, and it was popular and used in English-language publications outside China until 1979. This Sin Wenz or New Writing was much more sophisticated than earlier alphabets. In 1940, several members attended a Border Region Sin Wenz Society convention. Mao Zedong and Zhu De, head of the army, both contributed their calligraphy for the masthead of the Sin Wenz Societys new journal. Outside the CCP, other prominent supporters included Sun Yat-sens son, Sun Fo, Cai Yuanpei, the countrys most prestigious educator, Tao Xingzhi, an educational reformer. Over thirty journals soon appeared written in Sin Wenz, plus large numbers of translations, biographies, some contemporary Chinese literature, and a spectrum of textbooks

12.
Cantonese
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Cantonese, or Standard Cantonese, is a variety of Chinese spoken in the city of Guangzhou in southeastern China. It is the prestige variety of Yue, one of the major subdivisions of Chinese. In mainland China, it is the lingua franca of the province of Guangdong and some neighbouring areas such as Guangxi. In Hong Kong and Macau, Cantonese serves as one of their official languages and it is also spoken amongst overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia and throughout the Western World. When Cantonese and the closely related Yuehai dialects are classified together, Cantonese is viewed as vital part of the cultural identity for its native speakers across large swathes of southeastern China, Hong Kong and Macau. Although Cantonese shares some vocabulary with Mandarin, the two varieties are mutually unintelligible because of differences in pronunciation, grammar and lexicon, sentence structure, in particular the placement of verbs, sometimes differs between the two varieties. This results in the situation in which a Cantonese and a Mandarin text may look similar, in English, the term Cantonese is ambiguous. Cantonese proper is the variety native to the city of Canton and this narrow sense may be specified as Canton language or Guangzhou language in English. However, Cantonese may also refer to the branch of Cantonese that contains Cantonese proper as well as Taishanese and Gaoyang. In this article, Cantonese is used for Cantonese proper, historically, speakers called this variety Canton speech or Guangzhou speech, although this term is now seldom used outside mainland China. In Guangdong province, people call it provincial capital speech or plain speech. In Hong Kong and Macau, as well as among overseas Chinese communities, in mainland China, the term Guangdong speech is also increasingly being used among both native and non-native speakers. Due to its status as a prestige dialect among all the dialects of the Cantonese or Yue branch of Chinese varieties, the official languages of Hong Kong are Chinese and English, as defined in the Hong Kong Basic Law. The Chinese language has different varieties, of which Cantonese is one. Given the traditional predominance of Cantonese within Hong Kong, it is the de facto official spoken form of the Chinese language used in the Hong Kong Government and all courts and it is also used as the medium of instruction in schools, alongside English. A similar situation exists in neighboring Macau, where Chinese is an official language along with Portuguese. As in Hong Kong, Cantonese is the predominant spoken variety of Chinese used in life and is thus the official form of Chinese used in the government. The variant spoken in Hong Kong and Macau is known as Hong Kong Cantonese, Cantonese first developed around the port city of Guangzhou in the Pearl River Delta region of southeastern China

13.
Jyutping
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Jyutping is a romanisation system for Cantonese developed by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong, an academic group, in 1993. Its formal name is The Linguistic Society of Hong Kong Cantonese Romanisation Scheme, the LSHK promotes the use of this romanisation system. The name Jyutping is a contraction consisting of the first Chinese characters of the terms Jyut6jyu5, only the finals m and ng can be used as standalone nasal syllables. ^ ^ ^ Referring to the pronunciation of these words. There are nine tones in six distinct tone contours in Cantonese, however, as three of the nine are entering tones, which only appear in syllables ending with p, t, and k, they do not have separate tone numbers in Jyutping. Jyutping and the Yale Romanisation of Cantonese represent Cantonese pronunciations with the letters in, The initials, b, p, m, f, d, t, n, l, g, k, ng, h, s, gw, kw. The vowel, aa, a, e, i, o, u, the coda, i, u, m, n, ng, p, t, k. But they differ in the following, The vowels eo and oe represent /ɵ/ and /œː/ respectively in Jyutping, the initial j represents /j/ in Jyutping whereas y is used instead in Yale. The initial z represents /ts/ in Jyutping whereas j is used instead in Yale, the initial c represents /tsʰ/ in Jyutping whereas ch is used instead in Yale. In Jyutping, if no consonant precedes the vowel yu, then the initial j is appended before the vowel, in Yale, the corresponding initial y is never appended before yu under any circumstances. Jyutping defines three finals not in Yale, eu /ɛːu/, em /ɛːm/, and ep /ɛːp/ and these three finals are used in colloquial Cantonese words, such as deu6, lem2, and gep6. To represent tones, only tone numbers are used in Jyutping whereas Yale traditionally uses tone marks together with the letter h. Jyutping and Cantonese Pinyin represent Cantonese pronunciations with the letters in, The initials, b, p, m, f, d, t, n, l, g, k, ng, h, s, gw, kw. The vowel, aa, a, e, i, o, u, the coda, i, u, m, n, ng, p, t, k. But they have differences, The vowel oe represents both /ɵ/ and /œː/ in Cantonese Pinyin whereas eo and oe represent /ɵ/ and /œː/ respectively in Jyutping. The vowel y represents /y/ in Cantonese Pinyin whereas both yu and i are used in Jyutping, the initial dz represents /ts/ in Cantonese Pinyin whereas z is used instead in Jyutping. The initial ts represents /tsʰ/ in Cantonese Pinyin whereas c is used instead in Jyutping. To represent tones, the numbers 1 to 9 are usually used in Cantonese Pinyin, however, only the numbers 1 to 6 are used in Jyutping

14.
Southern Min
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Southern Min, or Minnan, is a branch of Min Chinese spoken in certain parts of China including southern Fujian, eastern Guangdong, Hainan, and southern Zhejiang, and in Taiwan. The Min Nan dialects are spoken by descendants of emigrants from these areas in diaspora, most notably the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia. In common parlance, Southern Min usually refers to Hokkien, including Amoy and Taiwanese Hokkien, the Southern Min dialect group also includes Teochew, though Teochew has limited mutual intelligibility with Hokkien. Hainanese is not mutually intellgible with other Southern Min and is considered a separate branch of Min. Southern Min is not mutually intelligible with Eastern Min, Pu-Xian Min, any other Min branch, Hakka, Cantonese, Shanghainese or Mandarin. Southern Min dialects are spoken in the part of Fujian. The variant spoken in Leizhou, Guangdong as well as Hainan is Hainanese and is not mutually intelligible with other Southern Min or Teochew, Hainanese is classified in some schemes as part of Southern Min and in other schemes as separate. Puxian Min was originally based on the Quanzhou dialect, but over time became heavily influenced by Eastern Min, eventually losing intellegility with Minnan. A forms of Southern Min spoken in Taiwan, collectively known as Taiwanese, Southern Min is a first language for most of the Hoklo people, the main ethnicity of Taiwan. The correspondence between language and ethnicity is not absolute, as some Hoklo have very limited proficiency in Southern Min while some non-Hoklo speak Southern Min fluently, there are many Southern Min speakers also among Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia. Many ethnic Chinese immigrants to the region were Hoklo from southern Fujian and brought the language to what is now Burma, Indonesia and present-day Malaysia and Singapore. In general, Southern Min from southern Fujian is known as Hokkien, Hokkienese, many Southeast Asian ethnic Chinese also originated in the Chaoshan region of Guangdong and speak Teochew language, the variant of Southern Min from that region. Southern Min-speakers form the majority of Chinese in Singapore, with the largest group being Hokkien, despite the similarities the two groups are rarely seen as part of the same Minnan Chinese subgroups. The variants of Southern Min spoken in Zhejiang province are most akin to that spoken in Quanzhou, the variants spoken in Taiwan are similar to the three Fujian variants and are collectively known as Taiwanese. Those Southern Min variants that are known as Hokkien in Southeast Asia also originate from these variants. The variants of Southern Min in the Chaoshan region of eastern Guangdong province are known as Teochew or Chaozhou. Teochew is of importance in the Southeast Asian Chinese diaspora, particularly in Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Sumatra. The Philippines variant is mostly from the Quanzhou area as most of their forefathers are from the aforementioned area, the Southern Min language variant spoken around Shanwei and Haifeng differs markedly from Teochew and may represent a later migration from Zhangzhou

15.
Taiwanese Romanization System
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The Taiwanese Romanization System is a transcription system for Taiwanese Hokkien. It is derived from Pe̍h-ōe-jī and since 2006 has been promoted by Taiwans Ministry of Education. It is nearly identical to Taiwanese Language Phonetic Alphabet Romanization for Hakka apart from using ts tsh j instead of c ch j for the fricatives /ts tsʰ dz/, Taiwanese Romanization System uses 16 basic Latin letters,7 digraphs and a trigraph. In addition, it uses 6 diacritics to represent tones, nn is only used after a vowel to express nasalization, so it has no capital letter. Palatalization occurs when J, S, Ts, Tsh followed by i, so Ji, Si, Tsi, of the 10 unused basic Latin letters, R is sometimes used to express dialectal vowels, while the others are only used in loanwords. O pronounced ㄜ in general dialect in Kaohsiung and Tainan, ㄛ in Taipei, -nn forms the nasal vowels There is also syllabic m and ng. ing pronounced, ik pronounced. A hyphen links elements of a compound word, a double hyphen indicates that the following syllable has a neutral tone and therefore that the preceding syllable does not undergo tone sandhi. 臺灣閩南語羅馬拼音及其發音學習網, Taiwanese Romanization System learning site by Ministry of Education, Taiwan

16.
Middle Chinese
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The fanqie method used to indicate pronunciation in these dictionaries, though an improvement on earlier methods, proved awkward in practice. The mid 12th-century Yunjing and other rime tables incorporate a more sophisticated, the rime tables attest to a number of sound changes that had occurred over the centuries following the publication of the Qieyun. Linguists sometimes refer to the system of the Qieyun as Early Middle Chinese, the dictionaries and tables describe pronunciations in relative terms, but do not give their actual sounds. The Swedish linguist Bernard Karlgren believed that the recorded a speech standard of the capital Changan of the Sui and Tang dynasties. This composite system contains important information for the reconstruction of the system of Old Chinese phonology. The Middle Chinese system is used as a framework for the study. Branches of the Chinese family such as Mandarin, Yue and Wu can be treated as divergent developments from the Qieyun system. The reconstruction of Middle Chinese phonology is largely dependent upon detailed descriptions in a few original sources, the most important of these is the Qieyun rime dictionary and its revisions. The Qieyun is often used together with interpretations in Song dynasty rime tables such as the Yunjing, Qiyinlue, Chinese scholars of the Northern and Southern dynasties period were concerned with the correct recitation of the classics. Various schools produced dictionaries to codify reading pronunciations and the associated rhyme conventions of regulated verse, the Qieyun was an attempt to merge the distinctions in six earlier dictionaries, which were eclipsed by its success and are no longer extant. It was accepted as the standard reading pronunciation during the Tang dynasty, the Qieyun is thus the oldest surviving rime dictionary and the main source for the pronunciation of characters in Early Middle Chinese. The rime dictionaries organize Chinese characters by their pronunciation, according to a hierarchy of tone, rhyme, the fanqie system uses multiple equivalent characters to represent each particular initial, and likewise for finals. The categories of initials and finals actually represented were first identified by the Cantonese scholar Chen Li in an analysis published in his Qièyùn kǎo. The Qieyun classified homonyms under 193 rhyme classes, each of which is placed one of the four tones. A single rhyme class may contain multiple finals, generally differing only in the medial or in so-called chongniu doublets, the Yunjing is the oldest of the so-called rime tables, which provide a more detailed phonological analysis of the system contained in the Qieyun. However, the analysis shows some influence from LMC, which needs to be taken into account when interpreting difficult aspects of the system. The Yunjing is organized into 43 tables, each covering several Qieyun rhyme classes, and classified as, One of 16 broad rhyme classes, each described as either inner or outer. The meaning of this is debated but it has suggested that it refers to the height of the main vowel, with outer finals having an open vowel

17.
Old Chinese
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Old Chinese, also called Archaic Chinese in older works, is the oldest attested stage of Chinese, and the ancestor of all modern varieties of Chinese. The earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones from around 1250 BC, bronze inscriptions became plentiful during the following Zhou dynasty. The latter part of the Zhou period saw a flowering of literature, including works such as the Analects, the Mencius. These works served as models for Literary Chinese, which remained the standard until the early twentieth century, thus preserving the vocabulary. Old Chinese was written with a form of Chinese characters. Although the script is not alphabetic, most characters were created by adapting a character for a similar-sounding word. Most recent reconstructions also describe Old Chinese as a language without tones, but having consonant clusters at the end of the syllable, most researchers trace the core vocabulary of Old Chinese to Sino-Tibetan, with much early borrowing from neighbouring languages. During the Zhou period, the originally monosyllabic vocabulary was augmented with polysyllabic words formed by compounding, several derivational affixes have also been identified. However the language lacked inflection, and indicated grammatical relationships using word order, the earliest known written records of the Chinese language were found at the Yinxu site near modern Anyang identified as the last capital of the Shang dynasty, and date from about 1250 BC. These are the bones, short inscriptions carved on tortoise plastrons and ox scapulae for divinatory purposes. The language written is undoubtedly an early form of Chinese, but is difficult to due to the limited subject matter. Only half of the 4,000 characters used have been identified with certainty, little is known about the grammar of this language, but it seems much less reliant on grammatical particles than Classical Chinese. From early in the Western Zhou period, around 1000 BC, even longer pre-Classical texts on a wide range of subjects have also been transmitted through the literary tradition. The oldest parts of the Book of Documents, the Classic of Poetry and the I Ching also date from the early Zhou period, a greater proportion of this more varied vocabulary has been identified than for the oracular period. The four centuries preceding the unification of China in 221 BC constitute the Chinese classical period in the strict sense, there are many bronze inscriptions from this period, but they are vastly outweighed by a rich literature written in ink on bamboo and wooden slips and silk. Although these are perishable materials, and many books were destroyed in the burning of books and burying of scholars in the Qin dynasty, other texts have been transmitted as copies. Such works from this period as the Analects, the Classic of Filial Piety, the Mencius, the Classical Chinese of such works formed the basis of Literary Chinese, which remained the written standard until the early twentieth century. Each character of the script represented a single Old Chinese word, most scholars believe that these words were monosyllabic, though some have recently suggested that a minority of them had minor presyllables

18.
Reconstructions of Old Chinese
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Several authors have produced reconstructions of Old Chinese phonology, beginning with the Swedish sinologist Bernard Karlgren in the 1940s and continuing to the present day. Although the various notations appear to be different, they correspond with each other on most points. By the 1970s, it was agreed that Old Chinese had fewer points of articulation than Middle Chinese, a set of voiceless sonorants. Since the 1990s, most authors have agreed on a six-vowel system, several other kinds of evidence are less comprehensive, but provide valuable clues. These include Min dialects, early Chinese transcriptions of foreign names, Middle Chinese, or more precisely Early Middle Chinese, is the phonological system of the Qieyun, a rhyme dictionary published in 601, with many revisions and expansions over the following centuries. These dictionaries indicated pronunciation by dividing a syllable into an initial consonant, according to its preface, the Qieyun did not reflect a single contemporary dialect, but incorporated distinctions made in different parts of China at the time. The fact that the Qieyun system contains more distinctions than any single form of speech means that it retains additional information about the history of the language. The large number of initials and finals are unevenly distributed, suggesting hypotheses about earlier forms of Chinese, often characters sharing a phonetic element are still pronounced alike, as in the character 中, which was adapted to write the words chōng and zhōng. In other cases the words in a series have very different sounds both in Middle Chinese and in modern varieties. Since the sounds are assumed to have been similar at the time the characters were chosen, the first systematic study of the structure of Chinese characters was Xu Shens Shuowen Jiezi. The Shuowen was mostly based on the seal script standardized in the Qin dynasty. Earlier characters from bones and Zhou bronze inscriptions often reveal relationships that were obscured in later forms. Rhyme has been a consistent feature of Chinese poetry, while much old poetry still rhymes in modern varieties of Chinese, Chinese scholars have long noted exceptions. This was attributed to lax rhyming practice of early poets until the late-Ming dynasty scholar Chen Di argued that a former consistency had been obscured by sound change and this implied that the rhyming practice of ancient poets recorded information about their pronunciation. Scholars have studied various bodies of poetry to identify classes of rhyming words at different periods, the oldest such collection is the Shijing, containing songs ranging from the 10th to 7th centuries BC. The systematic study of Old Chinese rhymes began in the 17th century, gus analysis was refined by Qing dynasty philologists, steadily increasing the number of rhyme groups. A final revision by Wang Li in the 1930s produced the set of 31 rhyme groups. The Min dialects are believed to have split off before the Middle Chinese stage, for example, the following dental initials have been identified in reconstructed proto-Min, Other points of articulation show similar distinctions within stops and nasals

19.
Protein
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Proteins are large biomolecules, or macromolecules, consisting of one or more long chains of amino acid residues. Proteins perform a vast array of functions within organisms, including catalysing metabolic reactions, DNA replication, responding to stimuli, a linear chain of amino acid residues is called a polypeptide. A protein contains at least one long polypeptide, short polypeptides, containing less than 20–30 residues, are rarely considered to be proteins and are commonly called peptides, or sometimes oligopeptides. The individual amino acid residues are bonded together by peptide bonds, the sequence of amino acid residues in a protein is defined by the sequence of a gene, which is encoded in the genetic code. In general, the code specifies 20 standard amino acids, however. Sometimes proteins have non-peptide groups attached, which can be called prosthetic groups or cofactors, proteins can also work together to achieve a particular function, and they often associate to form stable protein complexes. Once formed, proteins only exist for a period of time and are then degraded and recycled by the cells machinery through the process of protein turnover. A proteins lifespan is measured in terms of its half-life and covers a wide range and they can exist for minutes or years with an average lifespan of 1–2 days in mammalian cells. Abnormal and or misfolded proteins are degraded more rapidly due to being targeted for destruction or due to being unstable. Like other biological macromolecules such as polysaccharides and nucleic acids, proteins are essential parts of organisms, many proteins are enzymes that catalyse biochemical reactions and are vital to metabolism. Proteins also have structural or mechanical functions, such as actin and myosin in muscle and the proteins in the cytoskeleton, other proteins are important in cell signaling, immune responses, cell adhesion, and the cell cycle. In animals, proteins are needed in the diet to provide the essential amino acids that cannot be synthesized, digestion breaks the proteins down for use in the metabolism. Methods commonly used to study structure and function include immunohistochemistry, site-directed mutagenesis, X-ray crystallography, nuclear magnetic resonance. Most proteins consist of linear polymers built from series of up to 20 different L-α-amino acids, all proteinogenic amino acids possess common structural features, including an α-carbon to which an amino group, a carboxyl group, and a variable side chain are bonded. Only proline differs from this structure as it contains an unusual ring to the N-end amine group. The amino acids in a chain are linked by peptide bonds. Once linked in the chain, an individual amino acid is called a residue, and the linked series of carbon, nitrogen. The peptide bond has two forms that contribute some double-bond character and inhibit rotation around its axis, so that the alpha carbons are roughly coplanar

20.
Fiber
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Fiber or fibre is a natural or synthetic substance that is significantly longer than it is wide. Fibers are often used in the manufacture of other materials, the strongest engineering materials often incorporate fibers, for example carbon fiber and ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene. Natural fibers develop or occur in the shape, and include those produced by plants, animals. Plant fibers are employed in the manufacture of paper and textile, wood fiber, distinguished from vegetable fiber, is from tree sources. Forms include groundwood, lacebark, thermomechanical pulp, and bleached or unbleached kraft or sulfite pulps, animal fibers consist largely of particular proteins. Instances are silkworm silk, spider silk, sinew, catgut, wool, sea silk and hair such as wool, mohair and angora, fur such as sheepskin, rabbit, mink, fox, beaver. Mineral fibers include the asbestos group, asbestos is the only naturally occurring long mineral fiber. Six minerals have been classified as asbestos including chrysotile of the serpentine class, short, fiber-like minerals include wollastonite and palygorskite. Instances are collagen family of proteins, tendon, muscle proteins like actin, cell proteins like microtubules and many others, spider silk, sinew, man-made or chemical fibers are fibers whose chemical composition, structure, and properties are significantly modified during the manufacturing process. Man-made fibers consist of regenerated fibers and synthetic fibers, the earliest semi-synthetic fiber is the cellulose regenerated fiber, rayon. Most semi-synthetic fibers are cellulose regenerated fibers, cellulose fibers are a subset of man-made fibers, regenerated from natural cellulose. The cellulose comes from sources, rayon from tree wood fiber, Modal from beech trees, bamboo fiber from bamboo, seacell from seaweed. In the production of fibers, the cellulose is reduced to a fairly pure form as a viscous mass. Therefore, the process leaves few characteristics distinctive of the natural source material in the finished products. Some examples are, rayon bamboo fiber Lyocell, a brand of rayon Modal, historically, cellulose diacetate and -triacetate were classified under the term rayon, but are now considered distinct materials. Synthetic come entirely from materials such as petrochemicals, unlike those man-made fibers derived from such natural substances as cellulose or protein. Metallic fibers can be drawn from ductile metals such as copper, gold or silver and extruded or deposited from more brittle ones, such as nickel, carbon fibers are often based on oxydized and via pyrolysis carbonized polymers like PAN, but the end product is almost pure carbon. Silicon carbide fibers, where the polymers are not hydrocarbons but polymers

21.
Weaving
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Weaving is a method of textile production in which two distinct sets of yarns or threads are interlaced at right angles to form a fabric or cloth. Other methods are knitting, felting, and braiding or plaiting, the longitudinal threads are called the warp and the lateral threads are the weft or filling. The method in which these threads are inter woven affects the characteristics of the cloth, cloth is usually woven on a loom, a device that holds the warp threads in place while filling threads are woven through them. A fabric band which meets this definition of cloth can also be using other methods, including tablet weaving, back-strap. The way the warp and filling threads interlace with each other is called the weave, the majority of woven products are created with one of three basic weaves, plain weave, satin weave, or twill. Woven cloth can be plain, or can be woven in decorative or artistic design, in general, weaving involves using a loom to interlace two sets of threads at right angles to each other, the warp which runs longitudinally and the weft that crosses it. One warp thread is called an end and one weft thread is called a pick, the warp threads are held taut and in parallel to each other, typically in a loom. There are many types of looms, Weaving can be summarized as a repetition of these three actions, also called the primary motion of the loom. Beating-up or battening, where the weft is pushed up against the fell of the cloth by the reed. The warp is divided into two overlapping groups, or lines that run in two planes, one another, so the shuttle can be passed between them in a straight motion. Then, the group is lowered by the loom mechanism. Repeating these actions form a fabric mesh but without beating-up, the distance between the adjacent wefts would be irregular and far too large. The warp-beam is a wooden or metal cylinder on the back of the loom on which the warp is delivered, the threads of the warp extend in parallel order from the warp-beam to the front of the loom where they are attached to the cloth-roll. Each thread or group of threads of the passes through an opening in a heddle. The warp threads are separated by the heddles into two or more groups, each controlled and automatically drawn up and down by the motion of the heddles, where a complex design is required, the healds are raised by harness cords attached to a Jacquard machine. Every time the harness moves up or down, an opening is made between the threads of warp, through which the pick is inserted, traditionally the weft thread is inserted by a shuttle. On a conventional loom, the thread is carried on a pirn. A handloom weaver could propel the shuttle by throwing it from side to side with the aid of a picking stick, the picking΅ on a power loom is done by rapidly hitting the shuttle from each side using an overpick or underpick mechanism controlled by cams 80-250 times a minute

22.
Textile
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A textile or cloth is a flexible material consisting of a network of natural or artificial fibres. Yarn is produced by spinning raw fibres of wool, flax, cotton, hemp, Textiles are formed by weaving, knitting, crocheting, knotting, or felting. The words fabric and cloth are used in textile assembly trades as synonyms for textile, however, there are subtle differences in these terms in specialized usage. Textile refers to any material made of interlacing fibres, a fabric is a material made through weaving, knitting, spreading, crocheting, or bonding that may be used in production of further goods. Cloth may be used synonymously with fabric but is often a piece of fabric used for a specific purpose. The word textile is from Latin, from the adjective textilis, meaning woven, from textus, the word cloth derives from the Old English clað, meaning a cloth, woven or felted material to wrap around one, from Proto-Germanic kalithaz. The discovery of dyed flax fibres in a cave in the Republic of Georgia dated to 34,000 BCE suggests textile-like materials were made even in prehistoric times. The production of textiles is a craft whose speed and scale of production has been altered almost beyond recognition by industrialization, however, for the main types of textiles, plain weave, twill, or satin weave, there is little difference between the ancient and modern methods. Textiles have an assortment of uses, the most common of which are for clothing and for such as bags. In the household they are used in carpeting, upholstered furnishings, window shades, towels, coverings for tables, beds, and other flat surfaces, in the workplace they are used in industrial and scientific processes such as filtering. Textiles are used in traditional crafts such as sewing, quilting. Textiles for industrial purposes, and chosen for other than their appearance, are commonly referred to as technical textiles. Technical textiles include textile structures for applications, medical textiles, geotextiles, agrotextiles. In all these applications stringent performance requirements must be met, woven of threads coated with zinc oxide nanowires, laboratory fabric has been shown capable of self-powering nanosystems using vibrations created by everyday actions like wind or body movements. Fashion designers commonly rely on textile designs to set their fashion collections apart from others, armani, the late Gianni Versace, and Emilio Pucci can be easily recognized by their signature print driven designs. Textiles can be made from many materials and these materials come from four main sources, animal, plant, mineral, and synthetic. In the past, all textiles were made from natural fibres, including plant, animal, in the 20th century, these were supplemented by artificial fibres made from petroleum. Textiles are made in various strengths and degrees of durability, from the finest gossamer to the sturdiest canvas, microfibre refers to fibres made of strands thinner than one denier

23.
Fibroin
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Fibroin is an insoluble protein present in silk created by spiders, the larvae of Bombyx mori, other moth genera such as Antheraea, Cricula, Samia and Gonometa, and numerous other insects. Silk in its raw state consists of two proteins, sericin and fibroin, with a glue-like layer of sericin coating two singular filaments of fibroin called brins. The fibroin protein consists of layers of antiparallel beta sheets and its primary structure mainly consists of the recurrent amino acid sequence n. The high glycine content allows for tight packing of the sheets, a combination of stiffness and toughness make it a material with applications in several areas, including biomedicine and textile manufacture. Fibroin is known to itself in three structures, called silk I, II, and III. Silk I is the form of fibroin, as emitted from the Bombyx mori silk glands. Silk II refers to the arrangement of molecules in spun silk. Silk III is a newly discovered structure of fibroin, silk III is formed principally in solutions of fibroin at an interface. Many species of Amycolatopsis and Saccharotrix bacteria are able to degrade both silk fibroin and polylactic acid

24.
Pupa
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A pupa is the life stage of some insects undergoing transformation. The pupal stage is only in holometabolous insects, those that undergo a complete metamorphosis, going through four life stages, embryo, larva, pupa. The pupae of different groups of insects have different names such as chrysalis for the pupae of butterflies, pupae may further be enclosed in other structures such as cocoons, nests or shells. In the life of an insect the pupal stage follows the larval stage and it is during the time of pupation that the adult structures of the insect are formed while the larval structures are broken down. The adult structures, imaginal discs, then grow to become the adult structures, pupae are inactive, and usually sessile. However, the pupae may be exarate or obtect and they have a hard protective coating and often use camouflage to evade potential predators. Pupation may last weeks, months or even years, for example, it is two weeks in monarch butterflies. The pupa may enter dormancy or diapause until the season for the adult insect. In temperate climates pupae usually stay dormant during winter, while in the tropics pupae usually do so during the dry season, anise swallowtails sometimes emerge after years as a chrysalis. Insects emerge from pupae by splitting the pupal case, and the process of pupation is controlled by the insects hormones. Most butterflies emerge in the morning, in mosquitoes the emergence is in the evening or night. In fleas the process is triggered by vibrations that indicate the presence of a suitable host. Prior to emergence, the adult inside the exoskeleton is termed pharate. Once the pharate adult has eclosed from the pupa, the empty pupal exoskeleton is called an exuvia, in most hymenopterans the exuvia is so thin, pupae are usually immobile and are largely defenseless. To overcome this, a feature is concealed placement. There are some species of Lycaenid butterflies who are protected in their pupal stage by ants, another means of defense by pupae of other species is the capability of making sounds or vibrations to scare potential predators. A few species use chemical defenses including toxic secretions, the pupae of social hymenopterans are protected by adult members of the hive. Examples are pupae of the orders Neuroptera, Mecoptera, Trichoptera, adecticous pupa - pupae without articulated mandibles

25.
Larva
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A larva is a distinct juvenile form many animals undergo before metamorphosis into adults. Animals with indirect development such as insects, amphibians, or cnidarians typically have a phase of their life cycle. The larvas appearance is very different from the adult form. A larva often has unique structures and organs that do not occur in the adult form and their diet may also be considerably different. Larvae are frequently adapted to separate from adults. For example, some such as tadpoles live almost exclusively in aquatic environments. By living in an environment, larvae may be given shelter from predators. Animals in the stage will consume food to fuel their transition into the adult form. In some species like barnacles, adults are immobile but their larvae are mobile, some larvae are dependent on adults to feed them. In many eusocial Hymenoptera species, the larvae are fed by female workers, in Ropalidia marginata the males are also capable of feeding larvae but they are much less efficient, spending more time and getting less food to the larvae. The larvae of species can become pubescent and do not develop further into the adult form. This is a type of neoteny and it is a misunderstanding that the larval form always reflects the groups evolutionary history. This could be the case, but often the stage has evolved secondarily. In these cases the form may differ more than the adult form from the groups common origin. Within Insects, only Endopterygotes show different types of larvae, several classifications have been suggested by many entomologists, and following classification is based on Antonio Berlese classification in 1913. There are four types of endopterygote larvae types, Apodous larvae - no legs at all and are poorly sclerotized. Based on sclerotization, three forms are recognized. Eucephalous - with well sclerotized head capsule, found in Nematocera, Buprestidae and Cerambycidae families

26.
Morus (plant)
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Morus, a genus of flowering plants in the family Moraceae, comprises 10–16 species of deciduous trees commonly known as mulberries, growing wild and under cultivation in many temperate world regions. The closely related genus Broussonetia is also known as mulberry, notably the paper mulberry. Mulberries are fast-growing when young, but soon become slow-growing and rarely exceed 10–15 metres tall, the leaves are alternately arranged, simple and often lobed and serrated on the margin. Lobes are more common on juvenile shoots than on mature trees, the trees can be monoecious or dioecious. The mulberry fruit is a fruit, approximately 2 to 3 cm long. Immature fruits are white, green, or pale yellow, in most species the fruits turn pink and then red while ripening, then dark purple or black, and have a sweet flavor when fully ripe. The fruits of the white-fruited cultivar are white when ripe, the fruit of this cultivar is also sweet, the taxonomy of Morus is complex and disputed. Morus classification is further complicated by widespread hybridisation, wherein the hybrids are fertile. Jams and sherbets are often made from the fruit in this region, black mulberry was imported to Britain in the 17th century in the hope that it would be useful in the cultivation of silkworms. It was much used in medicine, especially in the treatment of ringworm. Mulberries are also widespread in Greece, particularly in the Peloponnese, mulberries can be grown from seed, and this is often advised as seedling-grown trees are generally of better shape and health, but they are most often planted from large cuttings which root readily. The mulberry plants which are allowed to grow tall with a height of 5–6 feet from ground level. Usually, the plantation is raised and in formation with a spacing of 6 feet ×6 feet, or 8 feet ×8 feet, as plant to plant. The plants are usually pruned once a year during the season to a height of 5–6 feet. The leaves are harvested three or four times a year by a leaf-picking method under rain-fed or semiarid conditions, depending on the monsoon, the tree branches pruned during the fall season are cut and used to make durable baskets supporting agriculture and animal husbandry. Some North American cities have banned the planting of mulberries because of the amounts of pollen they produce. In actuality, only the male mulberry trees produce pollen, this light-weight pollen can be inhaled deeply into the lungs, conversely, female mulberry trees produce all-female flowers, which draw pollen and dust from the air. Because of this feature, all-female mulberry trees have an OPALS allergy scale rating of just 1

27.
Sericulture
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Sericulture, or silk farming, is the cultivation of silkworms to produce silk. Although there are several species of silkworms, Bombyx mori is the most widely used. Silk was first produced in China as early as the Neolithic period, sericulture has become an important cottage industry in countries such as Brazil, China, France, India, Italy, Japan, Korea, and Russia. Today, China and India are the two producers, with more than 60% of the worlds annual production. According to Confucian text, the discovery of silk production dates to about 2700 BC, by about the first half of the 1st century AD it had reached ancient Khotan, by a series of interactions along the Silk Road. By 140 AD the practice had been established in India, in the 6th century the smuggling of silkworm eggs into the Byzantine Empire led to its establishment in the Mediterranean, remaining a monopoly in the Byzantine Empire for centuries. Chinese sericulture process Silkworm larvae are fed with leaves, and, after the fourth moult, climb a twig placed near them. This process is achieved by the worm through a fluid secreted from its structural glands. The silk is a continuous filament comprising fibroin protein, secreted from two glands in the head of each larva, and a gum called sericin, which cements the filaments. The sericin is removed by placing the cocoons in hot water and this is known as the degumming process. The immersion in hot water also kills the silkworm pupae, single filaments are combined to form thread, which is drawn under tension through several guides and wound onto reels. The threads may be plied to form yarn, after drying, the raw silk is packed according to quality. The stages of production are as follows, The silk moth lays thousands of eggs, the silk moth eggs hatch to form larvae or caterpillars, known as silkworms. The larvae feed on mulberry leaves, having grown and moulted several times silkworm weaves a net to hold itself It swings its head from side to side in a figure 8 distributing the saliva that will form silk. The silk solidifies when it contacts the air, the silkworm spins approximately one mile of filament and completely encloses itself in a cocoon in about two or three days. The amount of quality silk in each cocoon is small. As a result, about 2500 silkworms are required to produce a pound of raw silk The intact cocoons are boiled, the silk is obtained by brushing the undamaged cocoon to find the outside end of the filament. The silk filaments are wound on a reel

28.
Prism
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In optics, a prism is a transparent optical element with flat, polished surfaces that refract light. At least two of the surfaces must have an angle between them. The exact angles between the surfaces depend on the application, the traditional geometrical shape is that of a triangular prism with a triangular base and rectangular sides, and in colloquial use prism usually refers to this type. Some types of optical prism are not in fact in the shape of geometric prisms, prisms can be made from any material that is transparent to the wavelengths for which they are designed. Typical materials include glass, plastic and fluorite, a dispersive prism can be used to break light up into its constituent spectral colors. Furthermore, prisms can be used to light, or to split light into components with different polarizations. Light changes speed as it moves from one medium to another and this speed change causes the light to be refracted and to enter the new medium at a different angle. The degree of bending of the lights path depends on the angle that the incident beam of light makes with the surface, the refractive index of many materials varies with the wavelength or color of the light used, a phenomenon known as dispersion. This causes light of different colors to be refracted differently and to leave the prism at different angles and this can be used to separate a beam of white light into its constituent spectrum of colors. Prisms will generally disperse light over a larger frequency bandwidth than diffraction gratings. Furthermore, prisms do not suffer from complications arising from overlapping spectral orders, prisms are sometimes used for the internal reflection at the surfaces rather than for dispersion. If light inside the prism hits one of the surfaces at a steep angle, total internal reflection occurs. This makes a prism a useful substitute for a mirror in some situations, ray angle deviation and dispersion through a prism can be determined by tracing a sample ray through the element and using Snells law at each interface. For the prism shown at right, the angles are given by θ0 ′ = arcsin θ1 = α − θ0 ′ θ1 ′ = arcsin θ2 = θ1 ′ − α. All angles are positive in the shown in the image. For a prism in air n 0 = n 2 ≃1 and this allows the nonlinear equation in the deviation angle δ to be approximated by δ ≈ θ0 − α + = θ0 − α + n α − θ0 = α. The deviation angle depends on wavelength through n, so for a thin prism the deviation angle varies with wavelength according to δ ≈ α, before Isaac Newton, it was believed that white light was colorless, and that the prism itself produced the color. It was only later that Young and Fresnel combined Newtons particle theory with Huygens wave theory to show that color is the manifestation of lights wavelength

29.
Angle
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In planar geometry, an angle is the figure formed by two rays, called the sides of the angle, sharing a common endpoint, called the vertex of the angle. Angles formed by two rays lie in a plane, but this plane does not have to be a Euclidean plane, Angles are also formed by the intersection of two planes in Euclidean and other spaces. Angles formed by the intersection of two curves in a plane are defined as the angle determined by the tangent rays at the point of intersection. Similar statements hold in space, for example, the angle formed by two great circles on a sphere is the dihedral angle between the planes determined by the great circles. Angle is also used to designate the measure of an angle or of a rotation and this measure is the ratio of the length of a circular arc to its radius. In the case of an angle, the arc is centered at the vertex. In the case of a rotation, the arc is centered at the center of the rotation and delimited by any other point and its image by the rotation. The word angle comes from the Latin word angulus, meaning corner, cognate words are the Greek ἀγκύλος, meaning crooked, curved, both are connected with the Proto-Indo-European root *ank-, meaning to bend or bow. Euclid defines a plane angle as the inclination to each other, in a plane, according to Proclus an angle must be either a quality or a quantity, or a relationship. In mathematical expressions, it is common to use Greek letters to serve as variables standing for the size of some angle, lower case Roman letters are also used, as are upper case Roman letters in the context of polygons. See the figures in this article for examples, in geometric figures, angles may also be identified by the labels attached to the three points that define them. For example, the angle at vertex A enclosed by the rays AB, sometimes, where there is no risk of confusion, the angle may be referred to simply by its vertex. However, in geometrical situations it is obvious from context that the positive angle less than or equal to 180 degrees is meant. Otherwise, a convention may be adopted so that ∠BAC always refers to the angle from B to C. Angles smaller than an angle are called acute angles. An angle equal to 1/4 turn is called a right angle, two lines that form a right angle are said to be normal, orthogonal, or perpendicular. Angles larger than an angle and smaller than a straight angle are called obtuse angles. An angle equal to 1/2 turn is called a straight angle, Angles larger than a straight angle but less than 1 turn are called reflex angles

30.
Holometabolism
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Holometabolism, also called complete metamorphism, is a form of insect development which includes four life stages – as an embryo or egg, a larva, a pupa and an imago or adult. Holometabolism is a trait of all insects in the superorder Endopterygota. In some species the life cycle prevents larvae from competing with adults because they inhabit different ecological niches. In some insects, the adults can protect and feed the younger stages, there are four general developmental stages, each with its own morphology. The first stage is from the fertilization of the egg inside the mother until the embryo hatches, the insect starts as a single cell and then develops into the larval form before it hatches. The second stage lasts from hatching or birth until the larva pupates, in most species this mobile stage is worm-like in form. Such larvae can be one of several varieties, elateriform, eruciform, scarabaeiform. Other species however may be campodeiform and this stage is variously adapted to gaining and accumulating the materials and energy necessary for growth and metamorphosis. The third stage is from pupation until eclosion, the pupae of most species hardly move at all, although the pupae of some species, such as mosquitoes, are mobile. In preparation for pupation, the larvae of many species construct a cocoon of silk or other material. There are three types of pupae, obtect, exarate, and coarctate, obtect pupae are compact, with the legs and other appendages enclosed. Exarate pupae have their legs and other free and extended. Coarctate pupae develop inside the larval skin, in this stage, the insects physiology and functional structure, both internal and external, change drastically. Adult holometabolous insects usually have wings and functioning reproductive organs, in this stage, reproduction is the top priority for queens and males. Around 45% to 60% of all living species are holometabolan insects. Juveniles and adult forms of insects often occupy different ecological niches. This fact is considered a key driver in the unusual evolutionary diversification of form, according to the latest phylogenetic reconstructions, holometabolan insects are monophyletic, which suggests that the evolutionary innovation of complete metamorphosis occurred only once. Paleontological evidence shows that the first winged insects appeared in the Paleozoic, carboniferous fossil samples already display a remarkable diversity of species with functional wings

31.
Embioptera
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The order Embioptera, commonly known as webspinners, are a small group of mostly tropical and subtropical insects, classified under the subclass Pterygota. The order has also referred to as Embiodea or Embiidina. The group probably first appeared during the Jurassic and is represented in Cretaceous amber. The common name comes from the insects unique ability to spin silk from structures on their front legs. They use the silk to make a web-like pouch or gallery in which they live, over 360 embiopteran species have been described, along with estimates of around 2000 species being in existence today. The order is distributed all over the world, being found on every continent except Antarctica, all webspinners have a remarkably similar body form, although they do vary in colouration and size. The majority are brown or black in colour, ranging through to a pink or reddish shades in some species, the body form of these insects is completely specialised for the silk tunnels and chambers in which they reside, being long, narrow and highly flexible. All the females and nymphs are wingless, whereas adult males can be winged or wingless depending on species. The head has projecting mouthparts with chewing mandibles, the compound eyes are kidney-shaped, there are no ocelli, and the antennae are long, with up to 32 segments. The body is cylindrical in form, adapted for the tubular galleries within which the insects live, the first segment of the thorax is small and narrow, while the second and third are larger and broader, especially in the males, where they include the flight muscles. The wings, where present, occur as 2 pairs that are similar in size and shape, long and narrow and these wings operate using basic hydraulics, pre-flight, chambers within the wings fill with hemolymph, making them rigid enough for use. On landing these chambers empty and wings become flexible, folding back against the body, wings can also fold forwards over the body, and this, along with the flexibility allows easy movement through the narrow silk galleries without resulting in damage. In both males and females the legs are short and sturdy, with an enlarged tarsomere on the first pair, the abdomen has ten segments, with a pair of cerci on the final segment. These cerci are highly sensitive to touch, and allow the animal to navigate while moving backwards through the gallery tunnels, because morphology is so similar between species, it makes species identification extremely difficult. For this reason, the form of taxonomic identification used in the past has been close observation of distinctive copulatory structures of males. Although males never eat during their span, they do have mouthparts similar to the females. These mouthparts are used to hold onto the female during copulation, after molting, the female lays a single batch of eggs either within the existing gallery, or will find new territory to start a new colony. Here, the hatch into nymphs that resemble small, wingless adults

32.
Gryllacrididae
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Gryllacrididae are a family of non-jumping insects in the suborder Ensifera occurring worldwide, known commonly as leaf-rolling crickets or raspy crickets. The family historically has been defined to include what are presently several other families, such as Stenopelmatidae and Rhaphidophoridae. As presently defined, the family contains two subfamilies, with the vast majority in the subfamily Gryllacridinae, the remaining subfamily, Lezininae, contains only a single genus with 12 described species. They are commonly wingless and nocturnal, in the daytime, most species rest in shelters made from folded leaves sewn with silk. Some species use silk to burrow in sand, earth or wood and these are predators of other insects and spiders. The Orthoptera Species File database lists the following subfamilies and genera, Lockwood, article discussing Gryllacrididae and its behavior

33.
Hymenoptera
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Hymenoptera is the third-largest order of insects, comprising the sawflies, wasps, bees, and ants. Over 150,000 species are recognized, with many more remaining to be described, females typically have a special ovipositor for inserting eggs into hosts or otherwise inaccessible places. The ovipositor is modified into a stinger. The young develop through holometabolism —that is, they have a larval stage. The name Hymenoptera refers to the wings of the insects, all references agree that the derivation involves the Ancient Greek πτερόν for wing. The Ancient Greek ὑμήν for membrane provides an etymology for the term because this order like several others has membranous wings. However, a key characteristic of this order is that the wings are connected to the fore wings by a series of hooks. Thus, another plausible etymology involves Hymen, the Ancient Greek god of marriage, Hymenoptera originated in the Triassic, with the oldest fossils belonging to the family Xyelidae. Social hymenopterans appeared during the Cretaceous, the evolution of this group has been intensively studied by Alex Rasnitsyn, Michael S. Engel, G. Dlussky, and others. This clade has been studied by examining the mitochondrial DNA, although this study was unable to resolve all the ambiguities in this clade, some relationships could be established. The Aculeata, Ichneumonomorpha, and Proctotrupomorpha were monophyletic, the Megalyroidea and Trigonalyoidea are sister clades as are the Chalcidoidea+Diaprioidea. The Cynipoidea was generally recovered as the group to Chalcidoidea and Diaprioidea which are each others closest relations. The cladogram is based on Schulmeister 2003, hymenopterans range in size from very small to large insects, and usually have two pairs of wings. Their mouthparts are adapted for chewing, with well-developed mandibles, many species have further developed the mouthparts into a lengthy proboscis, with which they can drink liquids, such as nectar. They have large eyes, and typically three simple eyes. The forward margin of the hind wing bears a number of hooked bristles, or hamuli, the smaller species may have only two or three hamuli on each side, but the largest wasps may have a considerable number, keeping the wings gripped together especially tightly. Hymenopteran wings have relatively few veins compared with other insects. In the more ancestral hymenopterans, the ovipositor is blade-like, and has evolved for slicing plant tissues, in the majority, however, it is modified for piercing, and, in some cases, is several times the length of the body

34.
Bee
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Bees are flying insects closely related to wasps and ants, known for their role in pollination and, in the case of the best-known bee species, the European honey bee, for producing honey and beeswax. Bees are a lineage within the superfamily Apoidea, presently considered as a clade Anthophila. There are nearly 20,000 known species of bees in seven to nine recognized families, though many are undescribed and they are found on every continent except Antarctica, in every habitat on the planet that contains insect-pollinated flowering plants. Some species including honey bees, bumblebees, and stingless bees live socially in colonies, Bees are adapted for feeding on nectar and pollen, the former primarily as an energy source and the latter primarily for protein and other nutrients. Most pollen is used as food for larvae, Bee pollination is important both ecologically and commercially, the decline in wild bees has increased the value of pollination by commercially managed hives of honey bees. The most common bees in the Northern Hemisphere are the Halictidae, or sweat bees, vertebrate predators of bees include birds such as bee-eaters, insect predators include beewolves and dragonflies. Human beekeeping or apiculture has been practised for millennia, since at least the times of Ancient Egypt, apart from honey and pollination, honey bees produce beeswax, royal jelly and propolis. Bees have appeared in mythology and folklore, again since ancient times, and they feature in works of literature as varied as Virgils Georgics, Beatrix Potters The Tale of Mrs Tittlemouse, yeatss poem The Lake Isle of Innisfree. Bee larvae are included in the Javanese dish botok tawon, where they are steamed with shredded coconut. The ancestors of bees were wasps in the family Crabronidae, which were predators of other insects. The switch from insect prey to pollen may have resulted from the consumption of insects which were flower visitors and were partially covered with pollen when they were fed to the wasp larvae. This same evolutionary scenario may have occurred within the vespoid wasps, until recently, the oldest non-compression bee fossil had been found in New Jersey amber, Cretotrigona prisca of Cretaceous age, a corbiculate bee. A bee fossil from the early Cretaceous, Melittosphex burmensis, is considered an extinct lineage of pollen-collecting Apoidea sister to the modern bees. Derived features of its place it clearly within the bees. By the Eocene there was considerable diversity among eusocial bee lineages. The highly eusocial corbiculate Apidae appeared roughly 87 Mya, and the Allodapini around 53 Mya, the Colletidae appear as fossils only from the late Oligocene to early Miocene. The Melittidae are known from Palaeomacropis eocenicus in the Early Eocene, the Megachilidae are known from trace fossils from the Middle Eocene. The Andrenidae are known from the Eocene-Oligocene boundary, around 34 Mya, the Halictidae first appear in the Early Eocene with species found in amber

35.
Wasp
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A wasp is any insect of the order Hymenoptera and suborder Apocrita that is neither a bee nor an ant. The Apocrita have an evolutionary ancestor and form a clade, wasps as a group do not form a clade. The most commonly known wasps, such as jackets and hornets, are in the family Vespidae and are eusocial, living together in a nest with an egg-laying queen. Eusociality is favoured by the unusual system of sex determination in Hymenoptera. However, the majority of species are solitary, with each adult female living and breeding independently. Many of the wasps are parasitoidal, meaning that they raise their young by laying eggs on or in other insects. Unlike true parasites, the larvae eventually kill their hosts. Solitary wasps parasitize almost every pest insect, making wasps valuable in horticulture for biological pest control of such as whitefly in tomatoes. Wasps first appeared in the record in the Jurassic. They are a successful and diverse group of insects with tens of thousands of described species, the largest social wasp is the Asian giant hornet, at up to 5 centimetres in length, among the largest solitary wasps is the giant scoliid of Indonesia, Megascolia procer. Some are predators, whether to feed themselves or to provision their nests, many, notably the cuckoo wasps, are kleptoparasites, laying eggs in the nests of other wasps. The name Wasp has been used for warships and other military equipment. The wasps are a paraphyletic grouping of hundreds of thousands of species, consisting of the narrow-waisted Apocrita without the ants. The Hymenoptera also contain the somewhat wasplike but unwaisted Symphyta, the sawflies, Hymenoptera in the form of Symphyta first appeared in the fossil record in the Lower Triassic. Apocrita, wasps in the sense, appeared in the Jurassic. Fig wasps with modern features first appeared in the Lower Cretaceous of the Crato Formation in Brazil. The Vespidae include the extinct genus Palaeovespa, seven species of which are known from the Eocene rocks of the Florissant fossil beds of Colorado, also found in Baltic amber are crown wasps of the genus Electrostephanus. Wasps are a group, estimated at over a hundred thousand described species around the world

36.
Ant
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Ants are eusocial insects of the family Formicidae and, along with the related wasps and bees, belong to the order Hymenoptera. Ants evolved from ancestors in the Cretaceous period, about 99 million years ago. More than 12,500 of an total of 22,000 species have been classified. They are easily identified by their antennae and the distinctive node-like structure that forms their slender waists. Larger colonies consist mostly of sterile, wingless females forming castes of workers, soldiers, nearly all ant colonies also have some fertile males called drones and one or more fertile females called queens. The colonies are described as superorganisms because the ants appear to operate as a unified entity, Ants have colonised almost every landmass on Earth. The only places lacking indigenous ants are Antarctica and a few remote or inhospitable islands, Ants thrive in most ecosystems and may form 15–25% of the terrestrial animal biomass. Their success in so many environments has been attributed to their organisation and their ability to modify habitats, tap resources. Their long co-evolution with other species has led to mimetic, commensal, parasitic, Ant societies have division of labour, communication between individuals, and an ability to solve complex problems. These parallels with human societies have long been an inspiration and subject of study, many human cultures make use of ants in cuisine, medication, and rituals. Some species are valued in their role as biological pest control agents and their ability to exploit resources may bring ants into conflict with humans, however, as they can damage crops and invade buildings. Some species, such as the red imported fire ant, are regarded as invasive species, all of these words come from West Germanic *ēmaitijǭ, and the original meaning of the word was the biter. The family Formicidae belongs to the order Hymenoptera, which also includes sawflies, bees, Ants evolved from a lineage within the aculeate wasps, and a 2013 study suggests that they are a sister group of the Apoidea. In 1966, E. O. Wilson and his colleagues identified the remains of an ant that lived in the Cretaceous period. The specimen, trapped in amber dating back to around 92 million years ago, has found in some wasps. Sphecomyrma possibly was a ground forager, while Haidomyrmex and Haidomyrmodes, older ants in the genus Sphecomyrmodes have been found in 99 million year-old amber from Myanmar. After the rise of flowering plants about 100 million years ago they diversified and assumed ecological dominance around 60 million years ago. Some groups, such as the Leptanillinae and Martialinae, are suggested to have diversified from early primitive ants that were likely to have been predators underneath the surface of the soil, during the Cretaceous period, a few species of primitive ants ranged widely on the Laurasian supercontinent

37.
Silverfish
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A silverfish is a small, wingless insect in the order Thysanura. Silverfish are nocturnal insects typically 13–25 mm long and their abdomens taper at the end, giving them a fish-like appearance. The newly hatched are whitish, but develop a greyish hue and they have two long cerci and one terminal filament at the tips of their abdomens, the filament projects directly off of the end of their body, between the left and right cerci. They also have two compound eyes, despite other members of Thysanura being completely eyeless, such as the family Nicoletiidae. Like other species in Apterygota, silverfish are completely wingless and they have long antennae, and move in a wiggling motion that resembles the movement of a fish. This, coupled with their appearance and silvery scales, influences their common name, silverfish typically live for two to eight years. Silverfish are agile runners and can outrun most of their predators, however such running is only possible on horizontal surfaces, as they lack any additional appendages and, therefore, are not fast enough to climb walls at the same speed. Silverfish are a species, found in Africa, the Americas, Australia, Eurasia. They inhabit moist areas, requiring a relative humidity between 75% and 95%, in urban areas, they can be found in attics, basements, bathtubs, sinks, kitchens, and showers. Before silverfish reproduce they carry out a ritual involving three phases, which may last over half an hour, in the first phase, the male and female stand face to face, their quivering antennae touching, then repeatedly back off and return to this position. In the second phase the male runs away and the female chases him, in the third phase the male and female stand side by side and head-to-tail, with the male vibrating his tail against the female. Finally the male lays a spermatophore, a capsule covered in gossamer. The female lays groups of fewer than 60 eggs at once, the eggs are oval-shaped, whitish, about 0.8 millimetres long, and take between two weeks and two months to hatch. A silverfish usually lays fewer than 100 eggs in her lifetime, when the nymphs hatch, they are whitish in colour, and look like smaller adults. As they moult, young silverfish develop a greyish appearance and a metallic shine and they may go through 17 to 66 moults in their lifetime, sometimes 30 in a single year - much more than most insects. Silverfish are among the few types of insect that continue to moult after reaching adulthood, silverfish consume matter that contains polysaccharides, such as starches and dextrin in adhesives. These include book bindings, carpet, clothing, coffee, dandruff, glue, hair, some paints, paper, photos, plaster and they will damage wallpaper in order to consume the paste. Silverfish can also damage to tapestries

38.
Mayfly
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Mayflies are aquatic insects belonging to the order Ephemeroptera. This order is part of an ancient group of insects termed the Palaeoptera, over 3,000 species of mayfly are known worldwide, grouped into over 400 genera in 42 families. Their immature stages are aquatic fresh water forms, whose presence indicates a clean and they are unique among insect orders in having a fully winged terrestrial adult stage, the subimago, which moults into a sexually mature adult, the imago. Mayflies hatch from spring to autumn, not necessarily in May, fly fishermen make use of mayfly hatches by choosing artificial fishing flies that resemble the species in question. One of the most famous English mayflies is Rhithrogena germanica, the fishermans March brown mayfly, the brief lives of mayfly adults have been noted by naturalists and encyclopaedists since Aristotle and Pliny the Elder in classical times. The German engraver Albrecht Dürer included a mayfly in his 1495 engraving The Holy Family with the Mayfly to suggest a link between heaven and earth. The English poet George Crabbe compared the life of a daily newspaper with that of a mayfly in the satirical poem The Newspaper. Immature mayflies are aquatic, and are known as nymphs or naiads, in contrast to their short lives as adults, they may live for several years in the water. They have an elongated, cylindrical or somewhat flattened body that passes through a number of instars, when ready to emerge from the water, nymphs vary in length, depending on species, from 3 to 30 mm. The head has an outer covering of sclerotin, often with various hard ridges and projections, it points either forwards or downwards. There are two large eyes, three ocelli and a pair of antennae of variable lengths, set between or in front of the eyes. The mouthparts are designed for chewing and consist of a labrum, a pair of strong mandibles, a pair of maxillae, a membranous hypopharynx. The thorax consists of three segments – the hindmost two, the mesothorax and metathorax, being fused, each segment bears a pair of legs which usually terminate in a single claw. The legs are robust and often clad in bristles, hairs or spines, wing pads develop on the mesothorax, and in some species, hindwing pads develop on the metathorax. The abdomen consists of ten segments, some of which may be obscured by a pair of operculate gills. The abdomen terminates in a pair of, or three, slender thread-like projections. The final moult of the nymph is not to the adult form, but to a winged stage called a subimago that physically resembles the adult. The subimago often has partially cloudy wings fringed with hairs, its eyes, legs

39.
Thrips
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Thrips are minute, slender insects with fringed wings and unique asymmetrical mouthparts. Different thrips species feed on a variety of plants and animals, puncturing them. Approximately 6,000 species have been described, many thrips species are pests of commercially important crops. A few species serve as vectors for over 20 viruses that cause plant disease, some species of thrips are beneficial as they feed on other insects or mites. The generic and English name thrips is a transliteration of the ancient Greek θρίψ, thrips. Like some other names such as sheep, deer, and moose. Other common names for thrips include thunderflies, thunderbugs, storm flies, thunderblights, storm bugs, corn flies, corn lice, freckle bugs, and physopods. The name of the order Thysanoptera is constructed from the ancient Greek words θύσανος, thysanos, tassel or fringe, Thrips are small hemimetabolic insects with a distinctive cigar-shaped bauplan. They are elongated with transversely constricted bodies and they range in size from 0.5 to 14 mm in length for the larger predatory thrips, but most thrips are about 1 mm in length. Flight-capable thrips have two similar, strap-like pairs of wings with a fringe of bristles and their legs usually end in two tarsal segments with a bladder-like structure known as an arolium at the pretarsus. This structure can be everted by means of pressure, enabling the insect to walk on vertical surfaces. Thrips have asymmetrical mouthparts unique to the group, unlike the Hemiptera, the right mandible of thrips is reduced and vestigial – and in some species completely absent. The left mandible is larger, forming a narrow stylet used to pierce the wall of tissues. Some species inject digestive enzymes as the maxillary stylets and hypopharynx are inserted into the opening to drain cellular fluids and this process leaves a distinctive silvery or bronze scarring on the surfaces of the stems or leaves where the thrips have fed. Thysanoptera is divided into two suborders, Terebrantia and Tubulifera, these can be distinguished by morphological, behavioral, and developmental characteristics. Females of the eight families of the Terebrantia all possess the eponymous saw-like ovipositor on the abdominal segment, lay eggs singly within plant tissue. The Thysanoptera were first described in 1744 as the genus Physapus by the Swedish entomologist Charles De Geer, in 1836 the Irish entomologist Alexander Henry Haliday promoted the genus to the rank of order, renaming them Thysanoptera. There are currently over six species of thrips recognized, grouped into 777 extant

40.
Leafhopper
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Leafhopper is a common name applied to any species from the family Cicadellidae. These minute insects, colloquially known as hoppers, are plant feeders that suck plant sap from grass, shrubs, or trees. Their hind legs are modified for jumping, and are covered with hairs that facilitate the spreading of a secretion over their bodies that acts as a water repellent and they undergo a partial metamorphosis, and have various host associations, varying from very generalized to very specific. Some species have a distribution, or occur throughout the temperate. Some are pests or vectors of plant viruses and phytoplasmas, the family is distributed all over the world, and constitutes the second-largest hemipteran family, with at least 20,000 described species. Members of the tribe Proconiini of the subfamily Cicadellinae are commonly known as sharpshooters, the Cicadellidae combine the following features, The thickened part of the antennae is very short and ends with a bristle. Two ocelli are present on the top or front of the head, the tarsi are made of three segments. The femora are at front with, at most, weak spines, the hind tibiae have one or more distinct keels, with a row of movable spines on each, sometimes on enlarged bases. The base of the legs is close together where they originate under the thorax. The front wings not particularly thickened, an additional and unique character of leafhoppers is the production of brochosomes, which are thought to protect the animals, and particularly their egg clutches, from predation and pathogens. Like other Exopterygota, the leafhoppers undergo direct development from nymph to adult without a pupal stage, while many leafhoppers are drab little insects as is typical for the Membracoidea, the adults and nymphs of some species are quite colorful. Some – in particular Stegelytrinae – have largely translucent wings and resemble flies at a casual glance, leafhoppers have piercing-sucking mouthparts, enabling them to feed on plant sap. A leafhoppers diet commonly consists of sap from a wide and diverse range of plants, leafhoppers mainly are herbivores, but some are known to eat smaller insects, such as aphids, on occasion. A few species are known to be mud-puddling, but as it seems, leafhoppers can transmit plant pathogens, such as viruses, phytoplasmas and bacteria. In some cases, the plant pathogens distributed by leafhoppers are also pathogens of the insects themselves, some species such as the Australian Kahaono montana even build silk nests under the leaves of trees they live in, to protect them from predators. Hence, a recent trend treats the most advanced hemipterans as three or four lineages, namely Archaeorrhyncha, Coleorrhyncha and Heteroptera and Clypeorrhyncha, within the latter, the three traditional superfamilies – Cercopoidea, Cicadoidea and Membracoidea – appear to be monophyletic. The leafhoppers are the most basal living lineage of Membracoidea, which include the families Aetalionidae, Membracidae, Melizoderidae. The leafhoppers are divided into a number of subfamilies, which are listed here alphabetically

41.
Beetle
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Beetles are a group of insects that form the order Coleoptera, in the superorder Endopterygota. Their front pair of wings is hardened into wing-cases, elytra, the Coleoptera, with about 400,000 species, is the largest of all orders, constituting almost 40% of described insects and 25% of all known animal life-forms, new species are discovered frequently. The largest of all families, the Curculionidae with some 70,000 member species and they are found in almost every habitat except the sea and the polar regions. They interact with their ecosystems in several ways, beetles often feed on plants and fungi, break down animal and plant debris, and eat other invertebrates. Beetles typically have a hard exoskeleton including the elytra, though some such as the rove beetles have very short elytra while blister beetles have softer elytra. Some, such as, stag beetles have a sexual dimorphism. Many beetles are aposematic, with colours and patterns warning of their toxicity. Many beetles, including those that live in places, have effective camouflage. Beetles are prominent in human culture, from the sacred scarabs of ancient Egypt to beetlewing art and use as pets or fighting insects for entertainment, many beetle groups are brightly and attractively coloured making them objects of collection and decorative displays. Over 300 species are used as food, mostly as larvae, species widely consumed include mealworms, however, the major impact of beetles on human life is as agricultural, forestry, and horticultural pests. Serious pests include the boll weevil of cotton, the Colorado potato beetle, the coconut hispine beetle, most beetles, however, do not cause economic damage and many, such as the lady beetles and dung beetles are beneficial by helping to control insect pests. The name of the order, Coleoptera, comes from the Greek koleopteros, given to the group by Aristotle for their elytra, hardened shield-like forewings, from koleos, sheath. The English name beetle comes from the Old English word bitela, little biter, related to bītan, another Old English name for beetle is ceafor, chafer, used in names such as cockchafer, from the Proto-Germanic *kabraz-. Beetles are by far the largest order of insects, the roughly 400,000 species make up about 40% of all species so far described. The four estimates made use of host-specificity relationships, ratios with other taxa, plant, beetle ratios, and extrapolations based on body size by year of description. The heaviest beetle, indeed the heaviest insect stage, is the larva of the beetle, Goliathus goliatus, which can attain a mass of at least 115 g. Adult male goliath beetles are the heaviest beetle in its stage, weighing 70–100 g. Adult elephant beetles, Megasoma elephas and Megasoma actaeon often reach 50 g and 10 cm, the longest beetle is the Hercules beetle Dynastes hercules, with a maximum overall length of at least 16.7 cm including the very long pronotal horn

42.
Neuroptera
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The insect order Neuroptera, or net-winged insects, includes the lacewings, mantidflies, antlions, and their relatives. The order consists of some 6,000 species, the group was once known as Planipennia, and at that time also included alderflies, fishflies, dobsonflies, and snakeflies, but these are now separate orders. Adult Neuropterans have four wings, all about the same size. They have chewing mouthparts, and undergo complete metamorphosis, Neuropterans first appeared during the Permian Period, and continued to diversify through the Mesozoic Era. During this time, several unusually large forms evolved, especially in the extinct family Kalligrammatidae, often referred to as the butterflies of the Jurassic due to their large, Neuropterans are soft-bodied insects with relatively few specialised features. They have large compound eyes, and may or may not also have ocelli. Their mouthparts have strong mandibles suitable for chewing, and lack the adaptations found in most other endopterygote insect groups. They have four wings, which are similar in size and shape. Some neuropterans have specialised sense organs in their wings, or have bristles or other structures to link their wings together during flight, the larvae are specialised predators, with elongated mandibles adapted for piercing and sucking. The larval body form varies between different families, depending on the nature of their prey, in general, however, they have three pairs of thoracic legs, each ending in two claws. The abdomen often has adhesive discs on the last two segments, the larvae of most families are predators. Many chrysopids eat aphids and other pest insects, and have used for biological control. Larvae in various families cover themselves in debris as camouflage, taken to an extreme in the ant lions, larvae of some Ithonidae are root feeders, and larvae of Sisyridae are aquatic, and feed on freshwater sponges. A few mantispids are parasites of spider egg sacs, as in other holometabolic orders, the pupal stage generally is enclosed in some form of cocoon composed of silk and soil or other debris. The pupa eventually cuts its way out of the cocoon with its mandibles, adults of many groups are also predatory, but some do not feed, or consume only nectar. The use of Neuroptera in biological control of insect pests has been investigated, showing that it is difficult to establish, a song on the 1999 album Suburban Light by The Clientele, Lacewings, describes watching the insects under the influence of drugs. The New Guinea Highland people claim to be able to maintain a muscular build, the understanding of neuropteran phylogeny has vastly improved since the mid-1990s, not the least courtesy of the ever-growing fossil record

43.
Flea
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Fleas are small flightless insects that form the order Siphonaptera. As external parasites of mammals and birds, they live by consuming the blood of their hosts, adults are up to about 3 mm long and usually brown. Bodies flattened sideways enable them to move through their hosts fur or feathers and they lack wings, and have mouthparts adapted for piercing skin and sucking blood and hind legs adapted for jumping. The latter enable them to leap a distance of some 50 times their body length, larvae are worm-like with no limbs, they have chewing mouthparts and feed on organic debris. Over 2,500 species of fleas have been described worldwide, the Siphonaptera are most closely related to the snow scorpionflies, placing them within the endopterygote insect order Mecoptera. Fleas arose in the early Cretaceous, most likely as ectoparasites of mammals and marsupials, each species of flea is more or less a specialist on its host animal species, many species never breed on any other host, though some are less selective. The oriental rat flea, Xenopsylla cheopis, is a vector of Yersinia pestis, the disease was spread by rodents such as the black rat, which were bitten by fleas that then infected humans. Major outbreaks included the Plague of Justinian and the Black Death, both of which killed a sizeable fraction of the worlds population. Fleas appear in human culture in such forms as flea circuses, poems like John Donnes erotic The Flea, works of music such as by Modest Mussorgsky. Flea legs end in strong claws that are designed to grasp a host, unlike other insects, fleas do not possess compound eyes but instead only have simple eyespots with a single biconvex lens, some species lack eyes altogether. Their bodies are compressed, permitting easy movement through the hairs or feathers on the hosts body. The flea body is covered with hard plates called sclerites and these sclerites are covered with many hairs and short spines directed backward, which also assist its movements on the host. The tough body is able to withstand great pressure, likely an adaptation to survive attempts to eliminate them by scratching, fleas lay tiny, white, oval eggs. The larvae are small and pale, have bristles covering their bodies, lack eyes. The larvae feed on organic matter, especially the feces of mature fleas, adults feed only on fresh blood. Immediately before the jump, muscles contract and deform the resilin pad, to prevent premature release of energy or motions of the leg, the flea employs a catch mechanism. Early in the jump, the tendon of the primary jumping muscle passes slightly behind the coxa-trochanter joint, generating a torque which holds the joint closed with the leg close to the body. To trigger jumping, another muscle pulls the tendon forward until it passes the joint axis, generating the opposite torque to extend the leg, the actual take off has been shown by high-speed video to be from the tibiae and tarsi rather than from the trochantera

44.
Fly
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True flies are insects of the order Diptera, the name being derived from the Greek di = two, and ptera = wings. Insects of this use only a single pair of wings to fly. Diptera is an order containing an estimated 1,000,000 species including horse-flies, crane flies, hoverflies and others. Flies have a head, with a pair of large compound eyes. Their wing arrangement gives them great manoeuvrability in flight, and claws, Flies undergo complete metamorphosis, the eggs are laid on the larval food-source and the larvae, which lack true limbs, develop in a protected environment, often inside their source of their food. The pupa is a capsule from which the adult emerges when ready to do so. Diptera is one of the insect orders and are of considerable ecological. Flies are important pollinators, second only to the bees and their Hymenopteran relatives, Flies may have been among the evolutionarily earliest pollinators responsible for early plant pollination. Flies can be annoyances especially in parts of the world where they can occur in large numbers. Larger flies such as flies and screwworms cause significant economic harm to cattle. Blowfly larvae, known as gentles, and other larvae, known more generally as maggots, are used as fishing bait. They are also used in medicine in debridement to clean wounds, dipterans are endopterygotes, insects that undergo radical metamorphosis. They belong to the Mecopterida, alongside the Mecoptera, Siphonaptera, Lepidoptera and Trichoptera, the possession of a single pair of wings distinguishes most true flies from other insects with fly in their names. However, some true flies such as Hippoboscidae have become secondarily wingless and this cladogram represents the current consensus view. The first true dipterans known are from the Middle Triassic, and they became widespread during the Middle, modern flowering plants did not appear until the Cretaceous, so the original dipterans must have had a different source of nutrition other than nectar. The basal clades in the Diptera include the Deuterophlebiidae and the enigmatic Nymphomyiidae, three episodes of evolutionary radiation are thought to have occurred based on the fossil record. Many new species of lower Diptera developed in the Triassic, about 220 million years ago, many lower Brachycera appeared in the Jurassic, some 180 million years ago. A third radiation took place among the Schizophora at the start of the Paleogene,66 million years ago, the phylogenetic position of Diptera has been controversial

45.
Midge
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Midges are a group of insects that include many kinds of small flies. They are found on every land area outside permanently arid deserts. The term midge does not define any particular group. Some midges, such as many Phlebotominae and Simuliidae, are vectors of various diseases, many others play useful roles as prey items for insectivores, such as various frogs and swallows. Others are important as detritivores, participating in various nutrient cycles, the habits of midges vary greatly from species to species, though within any particular family midges commonly have similar ecological roles. One type of midge ceratopogonid midges is a pollinator of Theobroma cacao because of its unique morphological and behavioral characteristics. Having natural pollinators has beneficial effects in both agricultural and biological production because it increases Theobroma cacao crop yield and also density of predators of the midges. Some of them spread the livestock diseases blue tongue and African horse sickness – other species though, are at least partly nectar feeders, most other midge families are not bloodsuckers, but it is not possible to generalise rigidly because of the vagueness of the term midge. There is for no objective basis for excluding the Psychodidae from the list. Most midges, apart from the gall midges, are aquatic during the larval stage, some Cecidomyiidae are significant plant pests. The larvae of some Chironomidae contain haemoglobin and are referred to as bloodworms. Non-biting midge flies are a nuisance around man-made bodies of water

46.
Arthropod
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An arthropod is an invertebrate animal having an exoskeleton, a segmented body, and jointed appendages. Arthropods form the phylum Arthropoda, which includes the insects, arachnids, myriapods, arthropods are characterized by their jointed limbs and cuticle made of chitin, often mineralised with calcium carbonate. The arthropod body plan consists of segments, each with a pair of appendages, the rigid cuticle inhibits growth, so arthropods replace it periodically by moulting. Their versatility has enabled them to become the most species-rich members of all guilds in most environments. They have over a million described species, making up more than 80% of all described living species, some of which. Arthropods range in size from the microscopic crustacean Stygotantulus up to the Japanese spider crab, arthropods primary internal cavity is a hemocoel, which accommodates their internal organs, and through which their haemolymph – analogue of blood – circulates, they have open circulatory systems. Like their exteriors, the organs of arthropods are generally built of repeated segments. Their nervous system is ladder-like, with paired ventral nerve cords running through all segments and their heads are formed by fusion of varying numbers of segments, and their brains are formed by fusion of the ganglia of these segments and encircle the esophagus. The respiratory and excretory systems of arthropods vary, depending as much on their environment as on the subphylum to which they belong, arthropods also have a wide range of chemical and mechanical sensors, mostly based on modifications of the many setae that project through their cuticles. Aquatic species use internal or external fertilization. Almost all arthropods lay eggs, but scorpions give birth to live young after the eggs have hatched inside the mother, arthropod hatchlings vary from miniature adults to grubs and caterpillars that lack jointed limbs and eventually undergo a total metamorphosis to produce the adult form. The level of care for hatchlings varies from nonexistent to the prolonged care provided by scorpions. The evolutionary ancestry of arthropods dates back to the Cambrian period, the group is generally regarded as monophyletic, and many analyses support the placement of arthropods with cycloneuralians in a superphylum Ecdysozoa. Overall however, the relationships of Metazoa are not yet well resolved. Likewise, the relationships between various groups are still actively debated. Arthropods contribute to the food supply both directly as food, and more importantly indirectly as pollinators of crops. Some species are known to spread disease to humans, livestock. The word arthropod comes from the Greek ἄρθρον árthron, joint, and πούς pous, i. e. foot or leg, arthropods are invertebrates with segmented bodies and jointed limbs

Old English (Ænglisc, Anglisc, Englisc), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest historical form of the English language, …

A detail of the first page of the Beowulf manuscript, showing the words "ofer hron rade", translated as "over the whale's road (sea)". It is an example of an Old English stylistic device, the kenning.

Alfred the Great statue in Winchester, Hampshire. The 9th-century English King proposed that primary education be taught in English, with those wishing to advance to holy orders to continue their studies in Latin.

In optics, a prism is a transparent optical element with flat, polished surfaces that refract light. At least two of …

A plastic prism

A triangular prism, dispersing light

Comparison of the spectra obtained from a diffraction grating by diffraction (1), and a prism by refraction (2). Longer wavelengths (red) are diffracted more, but refracted less than shorter wavelengths (violet).